The Form 8-B12B Files Dataset is a closed historical archive of every Form 8-B12B and Form 8-B12B/A submission accepted by EDGAR between February 1994 and the form's rescission in September 1997. Each record represents one EDGAR submission of a successor-issuer registration under Section 12(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 — the abbreviated registration that listed-company successors used after holding-company reorganizations, reincorporation mergers, and statutory mergers to inherit the predecessor's exchange-registered class. Filings were made by the successor corporate issuer at or shortly after the effective time of the succession, coordinated with the exchange's listing of the successor's class. Because the SEC rescinded Form 8-B in September 1997 and replaced it with the Rule 12g-3 deemed-registration mechanism, no further records can ever be added; the dataset is a fully enumerable, finite population covering roughly three and a half years of mid-1990s exchange-listed corporate successions. Records are distributed as monthly ZIP archives containing per-accession folders with one metadata.json describing the submission and one or more document-{N}.txt files holding the Form 8-B body and its exhibits.
Programmatically retrieve the full list of dataset archive files, download URLs and dataset metadata.
Dataset Index JSON API
Download the entire dataset as a single archive file.
Download Entire Dataset:
Download a single container file (e.g. monthly archive) from the dataset.
Download Single Container:
The dataset captures the complete EDGAR-era population of Form 8-B12B activity. Form 8-B was the Exchange Act registration form prescribed for the securities of successor issuers — entities that did not themselves have a class of securities registered under Section 12 but had succeeded to a predecessor that did, typically through a holding-company reorganisation, a merger, or a reincorporation in another state. The "12B" suffix indicates registration on a national securities exchange under Section 12(b), as distinct from over-the-counter registration under Section 12(g), which used Form 8-B12G. The "/A" suffix designates an amendment to a previously filed Form 8-B12B.
The corpus is closed-ended. It covers every Form 8-B12B and 8-B12B/A submission accepted by EDGAR between February 1994 and the form's rescission in September 1997, after which no further filings of this type were ever made. Monthly partitions exist only for that window, and no future records can be added. The form was rescinded effective September 1997, when the SEC replaced it with amendments to Rule 12g-3 that allow succession registration to occur automatically under more general rules. The dataset therefore represents the entire historical EDGAR-era population of 8-B12B activity, with no format evolution to track inside the corpus: there was no HTML adoption phase for this form and no XBRL adoption phase, because both followed the form's rescission.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP archives in which the only file types found are TXT and JSON. There are no SGML wrappers, no HTML renditions, no XBRL data files, and no embedded images.
A single record in the Form 8-B12B Files dataset is one complete EDGAR submission of Form 8-B12B, or of its amendment counterpart Form 8-B12B/A, identified by an 18-digit accession number. On disk, the record materialises as a per-accession folder that contains exactly one metadata.json describing the submission and one or more document-{N}.txt files holding the textual bodies of the Form 8-B itself and any exhibits filed alongside it.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP archives, partitioned YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip under the dataset namespace. Each archive contains a single top-level folder whose name matches the partition month (for example 1996-09/). Inside that folder, every accession is its own subfolder, named by the EDGAR accession number with the dashes stripped (for example 000095013496004670/).
Within each accession folder there are exactly two kinds of files:
metadata.json — always present, exactly one per filing. Encodes the EDGAR submission header plus a small number of derived fields.document-{N}.txt — one per non-image document in the EDGAR submission, numbered to match the sequence field of the corresponding entry in metadata.json -> documentFormatFiles. The lowest-numbered file (document-1.txt) holds the Form 8-B body itself; subsequent numbered files carry the exhibits in the order they were filed.A typical layout looks like this:
1
1996-09/
2
├── 000072048196000011/ (8-B12B/A — single short amendment body)
3
│ ├── metadata.json
4
│ └── document-1.txt
5
└── 000095013496004670/ (8-B12B — original with exhibits)
6
├── metadata.json
7
├── document-1.txt FORM 8-B body
8
├── document-2.txt EX-21.1 — subsidiaries
9
├── document-3.txt EX-23.1 — consent
10
├── document-4.txt EX-23.2
11
├── document-5.txt EX-23.3
12
└── document-6.txt EX-23.4
Image exhibits that were part of the original EDGAR submission are deliberately excluded; the on-disk document count can therefore be smaller than the document count enumerated in the original EDGAR full-submission file.
metadata.json shapemetadata.json is a flat JSON object that mirrors the EDGAR submission header and adds a few normalised fields. The principal keys are:
formType — "8-B12B" for an original registration, "8-B12B/A" for an amendment.accessionNo — hyphenated EDGAR accession (for example 0000950134-96-004670); the on-disk folder name is the same value with dashes removed.filedAt — ISO-8601 filing timestamp. For these legacy filings the time component is uniformly midnight Eastern (T00:00:00-04:00), reflecting day-level granularity in the EDGAR header.description — human-readable form description (for example "Form 8-B12B - Registrations of Securities of certain successor issuers"). Amendments append the suffix [Amend].linkToFilingDetails, linkToTxt, linkToHtml — URLs pointing to the EDGAR archive directory, the complete submission .txt, and the EDGAR -index.htm landing page respectively.linkToXbrl — empty for every record; Form 8-B never carried XBRL data.documentFormatFiles[] — an ordered array with one entry per primary document plus a final pseudo-entry describing the EDGAR full-submission text bundle. Each entry carries sequence (numeric, used as the join key to document-{N}.txt), size in bytes as a string, documentUrl, type (for example 8-B12B, EX-21.1, EX-23.1), and an optional description. The trailing pseudo-entry has sequence equal to a single space (" ") and description "Complete submission text file"; it is metadata about the upstream EDGAR object only and does not correspond to any file inside the container.entities[] — an array of filer records (typically one filer for an 8-B12B registration). Each entry holds companyName (suffixed (Filer)), cik, fileNo, irsNo, sic (numeric code together with its label, for example "7373 Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design"), stateOfIncorporation, fiscalYearEnd (MMDD), act ("34" for Exchange Act registrations), filmNo, type (the filer-level form type), and tickers[] — a list that for successor-issuer registrations frequently carries multiple symbols, including the predecessor's symbol, the successor's symbol, and any related parent symbols.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[] — always empty for this dataset; it is an investment-company concept that does not apply to 8-B registrations.dataFiles[] — always empty; no XBRL is associated with Form 8-B.id — an internal record hash.document-1.txt)document-1.txt is the Form 8-B body itself. It is plain UTF-8 ASCII text extracted from the EDGAR submission without the surrounding SGML <DOCUMENT>…</DOCUMENT> envelope; there is no <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, or <TEXT> tag inside the file, because that document-level metadata is preserved in the corresponding documentFormatFiles entry of metadata.json. What remains in the body is typewriter-style ASCII text retaining the legacy EDGAR pagination markers <PAGE> N that segment the document into virtual printed pages, plus monospaced rule lines (-----), centred captions, and underlined headers rendered with hyphen runs.
The body opens with a standard heading block identifying the Securities and Exchange Commission, the form name (FORM 8-B), the descriptor FOR REGISTRATION OF SECURITIES OF CERTAIN SUCCESSOR ISSUERS, the citation to Section 12(b) or 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the exact name of the registrant, the state of incorporation, the IRS employer identification number, and the registrant's address and telephone number. The body then proceeds through the small, fixed Item structure prescribed by the form:
document-2.txt, document-3.txt, and onward.The body closes with a signature page bearing the registrant's name, the date, and the signature and title of the executing officer (typically the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, or general counsel).
document-2.txt onwards)Exhibits are filed as additional ASCII text bodies, each in its own document-{N}.txt file and each described by its own documentFormatFiles entry whose type field carries the Exchange Act exhibit code. Two exhibit families recur in this dataset:
Each exhibit body is brief — usually a single page of letterhead text — and follows the same paginated ASCII convention as the main body, including the <PAGE> markers when the original EDGAR submission was paginated.
8-B12B/A)Amendments are structurally indistinguishable from originals on disk. They occupy the same per-accession folder layout, use the same metadata.json schema, and carry the same paginated ASCII bodies. Only two surface signals identify an amendment: the formType value "8-B12B/A" and the [Amend] suffix in description. The content of an amendment is typically narrower than that of the underlying original — frequently just a handful of replacement pages correcting a specific Item or supplementing the exhibit list, sometimes only a single short document — but the file layout makes no distinction. Reconstructing the as-amended state of a registration requires manually pairing an amendment with its underlying original on the basis of registrant CIK and filing-date proximity; the dataset itself does not link them.
Every record includes the metadata.json describing the submission and the textual bodies of every non-image document in the original EDGAR submission. Image exhibits — typically corporate logos, signature scans, or graphical materials — are explicitly excluded; this is the only systematic content omission. The trailing "Complete submission text file" entry in documentFormatFiles is metadata only and does not correspond to a file on disk; the upstream EDGAR full-submission .txt is reachable via linkToTxt but is not bundled into the container.
Because Form 8-B is a registration form rather than a periodic or event-driven report, several content categories that appear in other EDGAR datasets are structurally absent here: no XBRL instance documents, no XBRL taxonomy schemas, no R-files or financial reports, no Inline XBRL fragments, no investment-company series-and-class metadata, and no graphical attachments. The dataFiles[] and seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[] arrays in metadata.json are correspondingly empty for every record.
Form 8-B was a creature of the early EDGAR era, and the dataset reflects that era's conventions exclusively. Every body is paginated ASCII text in the SGML-era EDGAR style, with <PAGE> N markers, monospaced rule lines, and centred typewriter-style headings. Because the form was rescinded before HTML or XBRL adoption would have applied to it, the dataset is uniformly textual across its 1994–1997 lifespan.
A few practical points matter when reading or extracting from these records.
sequence field in documentFormatFiles is the canonical join key from metadata to on-disk file; the document order in the JSON array always matches the numbered suffix of document-{N}.txt. The single-space sequence entry is an EDGAR full-text-bundle artefact and should be filtered out before joining.<PAGE> markers inside the bodies are EDGAR pagination artefacts, not content boundaries, and should generally be stripped for text-mining purposes. Nothing else delimits Items inside the body.ITEM 4. DESCRIPTION OF THE REGISTRANT'S SECURITIES TO BE REGISTERED. versus ITEM 4. DESCRIPTION OF REGISTRANT'S SECURITIES). Robust extraction of Items 1 through 5 should rely on case-insensitive matching against the ITEM N. prefix rather than exact-string anchors.entities[].tickers array can carry more than one symbol per filing because successor-issuer registrations frequently list both the predecessor's and the successor's trading symbols, and sometimes a parent's as well.sequence present in documentFormatFiles, the missing entry is an image exhibit dropped during ingestion, not a corruption.Every Form 8-B12B (and Form 8-B12B/A amendment) record is filed by a successor corporate issuer — a domestic corporation that, by operation of a succession transaction, has just stepped into the shoes of an Exchange Act reporting predecessor whose securities were listed on a national securities exchange. The successor is the registrant; the predecessor is described in the filing but does not file the form.
The filer population is narrow and falls into a few recurring corporate patterns:
Investment companies, foreign private issuers, partnerships, and individual reporting persons are not part of this filer population. Those parties register and report under different regimes (N-series, 20-F, partnership-specific forms).
Form 8-B12B is an event-driven registration statement, not a periodic report. The triggering event is a corporate succession in which the successor inherits a class of securities that was already registered under Section 12 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and listed on a national securities exchange. Typical triggers:
The filing was made at or shortly after the effective time of the succession, coordinated with the exchange's listing of the successor's class, so that Section 12(b) registration carried over without a gap. There is no periodic cadence; volume is bounded by the universe of qualifying successions that occurred while the form was in effect. Form 8-B12B/A amendments were filed as needed to respond to staff comments or to update disclosure.
The form lived inside the Section 12(b) registration regime of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which requires registration of any class of securities listed on a national securities exchange. Form 8-B was the abbreviated successor-registration vehicle: rather than re-running a full Form 10, the successor registered by reference to the predecessor's existing Exchange Act file, supplementing it with information about the succession transaction, the successor's corporate structure, and the class being listed. The "12B" suffix designates Section 12(b) (exchange-listed) registration; the parallel Form 8-B12G covered Section 12(g) over-the-counter successor registrations and is a separate dataset.
The Commission rescinded Form 8-B effective in September 1997 as part of a simplification of successor-issuer registration. The replacement is the Rule 12g-3 deemed-registration mechanism under the Exchange Act: when a successor succeeds to a class of securities of a predecessor that was registered under Section 12, the successor's class is deemed registered by operation of the rule, with no separately filed registration statement required. Post-1997, a successor typically announces the succession on Form 8-K and resumes periodic reporting (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K) in its own name, while registration carries over automatically under Rule 12g-3.
Because the form was rescinded, the dataset is closed and finite. The earliest electronic 8-B12B filings on EDGAR appear in February 1994, when EDGAR acceptance of the form began, and the latest filings cluster around the September 1997 rescission. Paper Form 8-B filings made before EDGAR mandates are not part of this electronic corpus. The result is a bounded, historical population of successor registrations spanning roughly three and a half years.
Form 8-B12B occupied a narrow niche: Exchange Act registration of an exchange-listed class for a successor issuer that inherited a predecessor's reporting status. Because the form was rescinded in September 1997 and the EDGAR record runs only from February 1994, the dataset is a closed historical set. The most useful comparisons are with its Section 12(g) sibling, the general Exchange Act registration forms, the Securities Act merger-registration form, the modern 8-K succession-disclosure pattern, the Rule 12g-3 mechanism that replaced 8-B, and Form 25 delistings that often accompanied successions.
The direct sibling. Both forms registered a successor's securities under the Exchange Act and shared substantially identical content: successor identification, succession mechanics, securities described, and continuity with the predecessor. The only difference is the registration channel. Form 8-B12B registered a class on a national securities exchange under Section 12(b); Form 8-B12G registered a class under Section 12(g) for OTC and threshold-based filers. Use 8-B12B for listed-company successions, 8-B12G for non-listed reporting successors. Both were rescinded together in 1997.
Form 10 (with the 10-12B and 10-12G suffixes flagging Section 12(b) versus 12(g) channels) registers a class of securities under the Exchange Act on the issuer's own merits. The endpoint is the same as 8-B12B (a registered class and periodic reporting), but Form 10 demands full business, financial, risk, management, and capitalization disclosure comparable to a 10-K. Form 8-B12B was deliberately thin because it leaned on the predecessor's existing current reporting; succession mechanics and identity continuity were the substance. After 1997, 10-12B became the residual vehicle when a successor actually needed a fresh registration statement, but most successions instead pass through Rule 12g-3 with no registration filing at all.
S-4 frequently appears in the same transaction as 8-B12B but addresses a different statute. S-4 is a Securities Act prospectus registering the new securities issued to predecessor shareholders in a merger, exchange offer, or reclassification, and contains deal terms, fairness opinions, pro forma financials, and tax treatment. 8-B12B is an Exchange Act registration that simply formalizes the successor's reporting-issuer status post-closing. Use S-4 for offer mechanics and deal documentation; use 8-B12B for the resulting reporting-entity succession.
Modern succession events are reported on Form 8-K rather than through any new registration statement. Item 2.01 (Completion of Acquisition) and Item 5.01 (Changes in Control), combined with the silent operation of Rule 12g-3, now carry most of what 8-B12B once handled. 8-K is event-driven, narrative, narrower per filing, and embedded in a continuing high-volume dataset. For successions from late 1997 onward, look to 8-K (typically paired with an S-4 and a predecessor Form 15). Form 8-B12B is the correct source only for exchange-listed successions filed between February 1994 and September 1997.
Not a form but a regulatory mechanism: under the 1997 amendments, a successor's securities are automatically deemed registered under the Exchange Act when defined succession conditions are met, eliminating the need for a fresh registration filing. Rule 12g-3 is the direct doctrinal replacement for Form 8-B. As a result, no post-1997 dataset mirrors 8-B12B; succession must be inferred from 8-K disclosure, predecessor Form 15 deregistration, and CIK continuity in EDGAR. This is what makes 8-B12B a closed artifact of the pre-amendment regime.
Form 25 notices removal from listing or registration on a national securities exchange. It is complementary to, not overlapping with, 8-B12B: a predecessor often files Form 25 to exit exchange registration while the successor uses 8-B12B to enter it. Pair the two when reconstructing the full lifecycle of a 1990s exchange-listed succession.
Form 8-B12B is distinct on four points. It is closed and bounded (February 1994 to September 1997). Its purpose is narrow: Exchange Act registration of a successor's exchange-listed class, not merits-based registration, an offering document, or an event report. Its content is intentionally thin, leaning on the predecessor's prior disclosure rather than restating the business. And no single modern dataset substitutes for it: post-1997 successions are scattered across 8-K, S-4, Form 15, and the silent operation of Rule 12g-3. For studying the population of mid-1990s exchange-listed successor registrations as a discrete, complete historical set, the Form 8-B12B Files Dataset is the appropriate primary source; for any other comparable question, look to its siblings or its modern replacements.
The roles below draw on different parts of the record: metadata.json (accessionNo, filedAt, formType, entities[]), the Items 1-5 narratives, and exhibits (notably EX-21 subsidiary lists and EX-23 auditor consents).
Used as a precedent library for successor-registration practice under the pre-1997 regime. Counsel pull Item 1 (registrant), Item 2 (succession transaction), Item 3 (securities to be registered), and Item 5 (financial statements and exhibits) for drafting conventions on share-for-share exchanges, downstream mergers, and reincorporations. EX-23 consents and EX-21 subsidiary lists show how successor entities inherited audit relationships and corporate-family structures. Output: drafting memos, comparative analysis against modern Rule 12g-3 succession notices, and litigation responses turning on 1990s reorganization disclosure.
Treat the records as a near-complete census of one transaction type during a discrete window. By joining filedAt and formType with the Item 2 transaction narrative, they classify successions (holding-company formation, state-change reincorporation, triangular merger) and study migration patterns between Delaware, other states, and offshore jurisdictions. Supports both quantitative prevalence studies and qualitative case work.
Use entities[] plus the Items 1-2 narrative to link successor CIKs to predecessor identities. The dataset repairs breaks in longitudinal records on shareholder bases, voting histories, executive compensation, and board tenure that would otherwise discontinue at a 1994-1997 reorganization.
Reconstruct CUSIP, ticker, and CIK lineage across reincorporations. When a successor took over a predecessor's listing, securities identifiers and tickers often persisted while the CIK changed; Item 1, Item 3, and entities[] together stitch predecessor and successor into a single instrument timeline. Supports corporate-action histories, total-return calculations spanning succession events, and identifier-resolution layers in financial-data products.
Verify that internal entity-master records of registrant succession match what was filed. accessionNo, filedAt, and entities[] provide the audit trail; Items 1-2 confirm the legal mechanics. Supports KYC remediation on long-lived counterparties, entity-master cleanup, and regulator inquiries about historical filer continuity.
Investigate long-tail successor liabilities. Item 2 identifies the predecessor, EX-21 lists subsidiaries carried into the successor, and EX-23 documents the auditor relationship at succession. Supports chain-of-title diligence on securities and identification of dormant subsidiaries that may still hold liabilities.
Study the transition from Form 8-B to the amended Rule 12g-3 that took effect in September 1997. The closed, full-population nature of the corpus is itself the analytical asset: it allows characterization of actual form usage, comparison of disclosure depth against the post-1997 regime, and assessment of what was lost or gained at rescission. Items 2 and 5, EX-21, and the formType split between 8-B12B and 8-B12B/A supply the raw material.
Use the corpus as a small, well-bounded benchmark for successor-registration question answering. Closed scope (one rule, one form family) suits evaluation harnesses that test predecessor-successor identity resolution, linkage of a current filer to a 1994-1997 event, and structured extraction from Items 1-5. The TXT bodies and metadata.json ingest cleanly.
The use cases below are the concrete workflows the dataset actually supports, each grounded in specific record components.
Reference-data teams stitching corporate-history timelines pull entities[].cik, entities[].tickers, and the Item 2 succession narrative to link a successor CIK back to the predecessor it inherited reporting status from. The Item 2 text names the predecessor and the form of the transaction (holding-company formation, Delaware reincorporation, triangular merger); entities[].tickers often carries both predecessor and successor symbols on the same record. The output is an entity-lineage table that lets identifier-resolution layers and total-return calculators carry through 1994-1997 reorganization events without breaking the time series.
Securities counsel drafting modern Rule 12g-3 succession notices or Section 12(b) registration statements use the corpus as a precedent set for pre-1997 successor practice. Item 2 supplies exchange-ratio language and transaction descriptions; Item 4 supplies inherited charter terms (voting, classified board, anti-takeover provisions); Item 5 supplies exhibit-list conventions. Filtering on formType == "8-B12B" and reading the corresponding document-1.txt bodies produces a clause-level drafting library scoped to listed-company successions.
M&A historians and academics treat the corpus as a near-complete population of one transaction type over a 44-month window. Joining filedAt (month-bucketed) with entities[].stateOfIncorporation and the Item 2 transaction narrative produces counts of Delaware reincorporations, offshore migrations, and holding-company restructurings. The closed, fully enumerable scope means prevalence statistics are exact rather than sampled, which supports publishable migration-pattern studies and comparison to the post-1997 8-K plus Rule 12g-3 regime.
Diligence and forensic-accounting teams investigating long-tail successor liabilities extract the EX-21 / EX-21.1 subsidiary lists from document-{N}.txt files where the matching documentFormatFiles[].type is EX-21*. Each list names the subsidiaries carried from predecessor into successor along with their states of incorporation, producing a frozen corporate-family snapshot at the moment of succession. Pairing that snapshot with later EX-21 filings on the successor's 10-Ks reveals which inherited subsidiaries were retained, sold, or dissolved, and which dormant entities may still anchor chain-of-title or environmental-liability claims.
Engagement-history and audit-rotation studies harvest EX-23 consents (type values EX-23.1, EX-23.2, etc.) to identify the accountants, fairness-opinion bankers, and outside counsel attached to each successor at registration. Because multiple EX-23 documents appear per filing, one per consenting professional, a single record yields a small adviser panel for the transaction. Aggregated across the corpus, this produces a frozen view of which audit firms and advisers dominated mid-1990s exchange-listed successions.
The closed scope and uniform paginated-ASCII format make the corpus a clean benchmark for structured extraction. Evaluation harnesses key on accessionNo, ingest document-1.txt, strip <PAGE> markers, and score model output on Item 1 registrant identification, Item 2 predecessor-successor pair extraction, Item 3 share counts, and EX-21 subsidiary enumeration. The formType == "8-B12B/A" subset additionally tests amendment-pairing logic, since the dataset deliberately does not link amendments to their originals and pairing must be inferred from CIK and filedAt proximity.
Compliance and legal-operations teams verifying that internal counterparty records correctly reflect a 1994-1997 succession query the dataset by predecessor or successor CIK, retrieve the matching metadata.json (for accessionNo, filedAt, entities[]), and read Items 1 and 2 to confirm the legal mechanics. The linkToFilingDetails URL provides a regulator-grade citation trail. This supports KYC remediation on long-lived counterparties whose current legal identity traces back to a mid-1990s reorganization, and grounds responses to regulator inquiries about historical filer continuity.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8b12b-files.json
This endpoint returns metadata describing the Form 8-B12B Files dataset, including the dataset name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total record count, total size, form types covered (8-B12B and 8-B12B/A), container format (ZIP), inner file types (TXT and JSON), the full dataset download URL, and the list of individual container files. Each container entry includes its key, size in bytes, record count, last updated timestamp, and direct download URL. Use this endpoint to monitor which containers were updated in the most recent refresh run and decide which ones to re-download on a daily basis. No API key is required to call this endpoint.
1
{
2
"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a03-b8b4-f49d3eda4e25",
3
"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8b12b-files.zip",
4
"name": "Form 8-B12B Files Dataset",
5
"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T18:20:55.789Z",
6
"earliestSampleDate": "1994-02-01",
7
"totalRecords": 458,
8
"totalSize": 4366841,
9
"formTypes": ["8-B12B", "8-B12B/A"],
10
"containerFormat": "ZIP",
11
"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON"],
12
"containers": [
13
{
14
"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8b12b-files/1997/1997-08.zip",
15
"key": "1997/1997-08.zip",
16
"size": 142337,
17
"records": 12,
18
"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T18:20:55.789Z"
19
}
20
]
21
}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8b12b-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the entire Form 8-B12B Files dataset as a single ZIP archive covering filings from February 1994 through September 1997. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8b12b-files/1997/1997-08.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container ZIP archive instead of the full dataset, which is useful for incremental syncing of only the months updated in the latest refresh. Each container holds per-accession-number metadata JSON files and the original EDGAR submission TXT documents. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers Form 8-B12B and its amendment counterpart Form 8-B12B/A — the abbreviated Exchange Act registration statement that successor issuers used to register an exchange-listed class of securities under Section 12(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
One record represents a single EDGAR submission of Form 8-B12B or Form 8-B12B/A, identified by an 18-digit accession number. On disk it materialises as a per-accession folder containing exactly one metadata.json and one or more document-{N}.txt files holding the Form 8-B body and any exhibits.
The filer was always a successor corporate issuer — typically a newly formed holding company, a Delaware reincorporation shell, or a statutory merger survivor — that had just inherited a predecessor's class of securities listed on a national securities exchange. Investment companies, foreign private issuers, partnerships, and individual reporting persons did not file the form.
The dataset covers the entire EDGAR-era population of Form 8-B12B activity, from February 1994 (when EDGAR began accepting the form) through September 1997 (when the SEC rescinded Form 8-B and replaced it with the Rule 12g-3 deemed-registration mechanism). No further records can ever be added.
The Commission rescinded Form 8-B effective September 1997 in favor of the Rule 12g-3 deemed-registration mechanism, under which a successor's class is automatically deemed registered when defined succession conditions are met, with no separately filed registration statement required. Because the form was retired, the dataset is a bounded historical population.
Form 8-B12B and Form 8-B12G are direct siblings with substantially identical content. The only difference is the registration channel: 8-B12B registers a class on a national securities exchange under Section 12(b), while 8-B12G registers a class under Section 12(g) for OTC and threshold-based filers. Both forms were rescinded together in 1997 and are distributed as separate datasets.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP archives partitioned YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip. Inside each archive, every accession is its own subfolder containing a metadata.json describing the submission and one or more document-{N}.txt files with paginated ASCII bodies of the Form 8-B and its exhibits. The only inner file types are TXT and JSON; there are no SGML wrappers, no HTML renditions, no XBRL data files, and no embedded images.