The Securities and Exchange Commission is offering its first look at the new reporting protocol required of oil, gas and mining companies as they report payments to governments and began a public review process.

Rather than relying on the traditional 10-K, to facilitate new reporting required under a rule approved earlier this month, as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC created the new Form SD. It will also be used by companies now required to disclose the use of “conflict minerals” that originated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or an adjoining country.

The final rule requires resource extraction issuers to file Form SD on the SEC's electronic EDGAR database no later than 150 days after the end of its most recent fiscal year. Reporting must be done using the XBRL interactive data standard. Because the XBRL submissions will be automatically rendered into a readable form available on EDGAR, the Commission is not requiring additional HTML or ASCII exhibits.

Among the data required in the reports: the total amounts of the payments, by category; the currency used to make the payments;  the financial period in which the payments were made; and the business segment of the resource extraction issuer that made the payments;

On Wednesday, the SEC it began seeking public comment on the draft Form SD taxonomy. Filers, investors, analysts, and software service providers are being encouraged to take part in the review process and offer suggestions for creating and using the XBRL tagged information.

The taxonomy is available here. Comments on the draft can be submitted online, using "Draft Form SD Taxonomy" in the “general subject” field. The deadline for comments is Oct. 31.

Upon completion of the public comment period and consideration of the feedback, the taxonomy will be finalized and made available for use with the Commission's systems. An alert that the updated taxonomy is available will be made via the standard taxonomies page.