The Form STOP ORDER Files Dataset is an EDGAR-native corpus of Commission orders issued under Section 8(d) of the Securities Act of 1933, each suspending the effectiveness of a specific registration statement on findings of material misstatement or omission. One record represents a single EDGAR accession in which the Securities and Exchange Commission has posted such an order against a named registrant, bundling the adjudicative PDF together with a normalized JSON representation of the EDGAR submission header. The SEC itself is the filer — every accession carries the institutional 9999999997 filer-CIK prefix that marks Commission-originated filings — while the registrant whose registration statement is being suspended appears as a subject entity inside the header. The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers of PDF and JSON files and covers EDGAR-native STOP ORDER submissions from December 2012 onward.
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 packages every EDGAR accession published under the literal form type STOP ORDER — the form code reserved for Commission orders entered under Section 8(d) of the Securities Act of 1933. Section 8(d) authorizes the Commission, after notice and an opportunity for hearing, to issue an order suspending the effectiveness of a registration statement on a finding that the statement contains an untrue statement of material fact or omits a material fact necessary to make the statements made not misleading. Each record in the dataset is therefore an adjudicative product of the Commission rather than a disclosure filed by a regulated party.
The dataset covers the full EDGAR-native population of these orders from the earliest digital STOP ORDER accession in December 2012 forward, with no sampling or filtering by registrant or industry. Volume is intentionally modest because Section 8(d) actions are exceptional events: monthly containers often hold only a handful of accession folders, and some months hold none or one, while busier months can hold roughly a dozen. Delivery is as one ZIP per calendar month containing PDF order documents and a per-accession metadata.json; no HTML body, SGML wrapper, or XBRL component is included, because EDGAR STOP ORDER submissions are PDF-only adjudicative documents.
One record in the Form STOP ORDER Files Dataset is a single EDGAR accession in which the Securities and Exchange Commission has posted a Commission order issued under Section 8(d) of the Securities Act of 1933 that suspends the effectiveness of a specific registration statement. The record is not a filing made by the registrant whose registration is being suspended; it is an adjudicative order entered by the Commission against that registrant and disseminated through EDGAR under the Commission's own internal filer identity. Each record bundles the order document together with a normalized representation of the EDGAR submission header, so that the textual order, the identification of the affected registrant, the statutory basis, and the EDGAR-side filing context all sit inside one self-contained accession folder.
The publishing vehicle for a Section 8(d) order on EDGAR is the literal form type STOP ORDER. Because the order is a Commission action, EDGAR records the filer as the SEC itself using the Commission's internal filer CIK 9999999997; every accession number in this dataset therefore carries the 9999999997- prefix (for example 9999999997-25-003721). The registrant whose registration statement is being suspended is not the filer; it appears as a subject entity inside the submission header and is keyed to the EDGAR file number of the registration statement being acted upon (commonly a 333- Securities Act file).
The dataset is published as one ZIP per calendar month under form-stop-order-files/<YYYY>/<YYYY-MM>.zip. Each monthly archive decompresses into a folder named after its year-month and holds one subfolder per accession. The accession subfolder is named with the 18-digit numeric form of the EDGAR accession number, dashes stripped (9999999997-25-003721 becomes 999999999725003721).
Each accession folder preserves every document from the original EDGAR submission, with the sole exclusion of image-type document files. In practice, the payload reduces to two artifacts:
metadata.json — a normalized representation of the EDGAR filing header plus the document manifest.filenameN.pdf. The primary order document carries sequence: "1" and is therefore commonly filename1.pdf.No SGML wrapper file, HTML rendering, or XBRL artifact is delivered in the accession folder; the EDGAR submission for a STOP ORDER is a single PDF order. The original EDGAR complete-submission .txt and the -index.htm filing-index page exist on EDGAR and are reachable through URLs preserved inside metadata.json, but they are not redelivered as files inside the ZIP.
metadata.jsonmetadata.json is a flat JSON object reproducing the EDGAR filing header in normalized form and listing the documents present in the submission. The fields that carry meaning for STOP ORDER records are:
formType — the literal string "STOP ORDER".accessionNo — the dashed EDGAR accession number, always carrying the 9999999997- Commission-filer prefix (e.g., "9999999997-25-003721").filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with timezone offset indicating when the order was posted to EDGAR (e.g., "2025-11-14T13:19:49-05:00").description — free-text description carried from the EDGAR header. For stop orders it typically concatenates the form label with one or more internal Item YYYYMMDD references (for example, "Form STOP ORDER - Stop Order - Item 20251114 Item 20251113").items — array of EDGAR item codes parsed from the submission header, generally formatted as "Item YYYYMMDD: " strings tying the order to specific Commission action dates.linkToFilingDetails — direct URL to the primary order document on www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/....linkToTxt — URL to the EDGAR complete-submission .txt file.linkToHtml — URL to the EDGAR -index.htm filing-index page.linkToXbrl — present in the schema but empty for this form type.documentFormatFiles — array of document descriptors. Each descriptor carries sequence, size (bytes, as a string), documentUrl, type, and optionally description. STOP ORDER submissions typically expose the PDF order itself (with type: "STOP ORDER" and sequence: "1") and the EDGAR complete-submission text file.dataFiles — array of structured-data attachments; empty for this form type.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — array of investment-company series/class metadata; empty for this form type.entities — array of entity objects describing the registrant whose registration statement is being suspended. The meaningful per-entity fields are cik (the registrant's EDGAR CIK, not the SEC's; e.g., "2088800"), companyName (the registrant's name with an EDGAR role suffix appended in parentheses, e.g., "Horizon Thread (PTY) Ltd (Filer)"), type (the role label, "STOP ORDER"), fileNo (the EDGAR file number of the underlying registration statement, typically a 333- Securities Act file such as "333-291005"), filmNo (EDGAR film number), act ("33" for the Securities Act of 1933), sic (the registrant's SIC code and label, with EDGAR's HTML entities such as & preserved verbatim), stateOfIncorporation (EDGAR two-character state or country code, e.g., "T3" for South Africa), irsNo, and fiscalYearEnd.id — opaque 32-hex-character record identifier assigned by the dataset producer (e.g., "2d81821b886352ce24245f548dcc7684").The combination of act: "33" and fileNo is particularly load-bearing: together they pin the order to the exact registration being suspended. act confirms the Securities Act of 1933 as the statutory basis, and fileNo resolves to the registrant's specific Securities Act registration file, which is the bridge from the Commission's administrative accession to the registrant's own filing history on EDGAR.
The 9999999997 filer CIK that prefixes every accession number is the operational signature of the administrative nature of these records. EDGAR is fundamentally a self-filing system in which issuers, insiders, and other registered persons file their own documents under their own CIKs. When the Commission itself originates a document — as it does with stop orders and other administrative orders — it posts that document through a designated internal filer identity rather than under the affected registrant's CIK. The downstream consequence is that the accession number cannot be used as an issuer identifier; the affected registrant must be retrieved from the entities array of metadata.json and from the body of the order. The cik and fileNo carried inside entities are the linkage points back to the registrant's own EDGAR record.
The PDF is the substantive content of the record. A typical Section 8(d) stop order is a short adjudicative document in legal-prose form, ordered approximately as follows:
333- file number).The content style is adjudicative rather than disclosure-oriented; the document does not contain financial statements, exhibits, or tabular schedules. Where supporting attachments to an order exist, they are preserved as additional non-image documents in the same accession folder under the filenameN.pdf pattern, but stop-order submissions are typically single-document accessions.
A record includes the Commission's stop-order PDF, every other non-image document that was part of the original EDGAR submission, and a metadata.json that captures the filing header, the document manifest with direct EDGAR URLs, the affected registrant's identifying metadata, the Securities Act citation, and the EDGAR file number of the suspended registration.
Image-type document files from the original EDGAR submission are excluded by the dataset producer. The EDGAR complete-submission .txt file and the -index.htm filing-index page are not redelivered as files inside the accession folder, although both are reachable through the URLs preserved in metadata.json. The dataset does not contain any documents from the registrant's own EDGAR history — for example, the suspended S-1 itself, any amendments, or related correspondence — those are reachable separately by following the registrant's CIK and the fileNo recorded in the entities block.
Several practical points matter when working with these records.
cik and fileNo from the entities block rather than the 9999999997- accession prefix.items array follows an "Item YYYYMMDD: " convention that encodes the date(s) of the underlying Commission action. These can be used to align the EDGAR posting with the order's effective issuance date, which may differ slightly from the filedAt timestamp.& in SIC labels) are preserved verbatim in metadata.json and should be decoded before display.stateOfIncorporation uses EDGAR's two-character state/country code system. Foreign registrants appear with codes outside the standard US-state set (for example, T3 for South Africa); applications should map these to the EDGAR country-code table rather than assume US states.documentFormatFiles[i].size is delivered as a string of decimal bytes; arithmetic uses should cast to an integer.9999999997 filer CIK accompanied by the EDGAR header metadata, with no HTML body, SGML wrapper, or XBRL component.Form STOP ORDER is structurally unusual on EDGAR: the filer is the Securities and Exchange Commission itself, not a registrant, issuer, insider, fund, manager, or third-party reporting person. Each record is a Commission order, drafted and entered by the SEC and disseminated through EDGAR as an administrative publication rather than a disclosure submitted by a regulated party. The 9999999997 accession prefix is the operational signature of that institutional identity, and it alone is enough to distinguish these records from registrant-filed forms in the EDGAR feed. The registrant named in the order is the subject of the action, not the filer; it has no role in submitting the document.
Stop orders are issued under Section 8(d) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. Section 77h(d)). Section 8 governs how registration statements become effective and how the Commission may block or suspend them:
Procedurally, Section 8(d) actions are conducted under the Commission's Rules of Practice as administrative proceedings rather than district-court litigation. A Section 8(d) stop order is distinct from a Section 8(b) refusal order and from a Rule 477 voluntary withdrawal: a refusal order operates only pre-effective; a stop order can either prevent effectiveness or suspend an already-effective registration statement; a withdrawal is registrant-initiated and is not an enforcement product.
A Form STOP ORDER filing publishes an administrative order that suspends the effectiveness of the identified registration statement. While in force, the registrant cannot lawfully offer or sell securities under that registration statement. If the statement was already effective, the order halts ongoing offers and sales; if not yet effective, the order prevents effectiveness.
The order does not rescind prior sales and does not bar the registrant's other operations. It is targeted at one registration statement. It remains in force until the Commission lifts it, typically after curative amendment, though in practice many stop orders are never lifted and the underlying registration statements stay permanently suspended.
Section 8(d) stop orders are event-driven, not periodic. An order issues only after the Commission finds, with notice and opportunity for hearing, that the registration statement contains a material misstatement or omission.
The pathway to that finding typically starts with a staff referral. The Division of Corporation Finance may identify disclosure defects in review and refer the matter for administrative proceedings. The Division of Enforcement may also develop the matter, particularly where the stop order is part of a broader enforcement response. Procedurally, a stop order may follow:
The document attached to each EDGAR submission is the Commission order itself, identifying the registrant, the findings of material misstatements or omissions, the Section 8(d) legal basis, and the formal suspension.
There is no scheduled cadence. Each record is one discrete enforcement action against one registrant's registration statement, appearing whenever the Commission concludes a Section 8(d) proceeding. The dataset is correspondingly low-volume: stop orders are rarely invoked relative to other Commission tools, and the staff more often resolves disclosure deficiencies through comment letters, refusal of acceleration, or registrant-initiated withdrawal, reserving Section 8(d) for cases where formal suspension is necessary.
Two dates are relevant and may diverge:
filedAt timestamp records when the order was published into EDGAR under the SEC-as-filer accession.The two are typically close, but EDGAR publication is an administrative step that follows entry of the order. The EDGAR timestamp should be treated as a dissemination marker, not as the effective date of the suspension.
The Commission has held stop-order authority since the original enactment of the Securities Act of 1933. Pre-EDGAR stop orders were published in Commission releases and the Federal Register but were not deposited in EDGAR under a form code. The Form STOP ORDER form type within EDGAR, as captured by this dataset, begins in December 2012, the earliest record available digitally under this form code. Earlier Commission stop orders exist in the historical record but fall outside the EDGAR-native scope of this dataset.
STOP ORDER filings are Commission-issued, adjudicative orders entered on EDGAR by the SEC under Section 8(d) of the Securities Act of 1933, suspending the effectiveness of a registration statement on findings of material misstatement or omission. Their closest neighbors fall into three groups: registrant-initiated alternatives, other Section 8 orders, and adjacent suspension or enforcement regimes. The comparisons below sharpen where each overlaps and where it stops being a substitute.
RW and AW are the registrant-initiated counterparts. Under Rule 477, an issuer asks the Commission to consent to withdrawal of a pending or effective registration statement, often to pre-empt staff action or restructure an offering. RW/AW are voluntary, procedural, and filer-submitted; STOP ORDER is forced, adjudicative, and SEC-submitted, with formal findings under Section 8(d). Many candidates for a stop order exit through an RW first, which is one reason the STOP ORDER population is small.
Section 8(b) and Section 8(d) are statutory siblings separated by timing. A Section 8(b) refusal order prevents a registration statement from becoming effective when it is incomplete or inaccurate on its face; a Section 8(d) stop order suspends a statement that has already become (or is about to become) effective. Both are Commission orders against a registration statement, but they attach at different points in the lifecycle and use different EDGAR designations. This dataset contains only Section 8(d) stop orders.
Section 8(a) orders are also Commission actions on the effectiveness of a registration statement, but they are enabling rather than adversarial: they accelerate, at the registrant's request, the date a statement becomes effective. They carry no findings of misstatement and are routine administrative actions, not entered under the STOP ORDER form type.
Form 25 (issuer-initiated) and 25-NSE (exchange-initiated) effect delisting and Section 12 deregistration of a class of securities from a national securities exchange. The filer is the issuer or the exchange, not the SEC, and the action concerns listing status under the Exchange Act, not the effectiveness of a Securities Act registration statement. Any overlap with stop orders is superficial.
A Section 12(k) suspension halts trading in a security for up to ten business days when public information about the issuer is inadequate or inaccurate. A Section 8(d) stop order instead suspends the effectiveness of a specific registration statement (blocking primary sales under it) with no fixed duration. Different statute, different filer surface, different operational effect; the only shared theme is "SEC action driven by disclosure concerns."
Cease-and-desist orders under Section 8A of the Securities Act or Section 21C of the Exchange Act are a broad enforcement remedy: they reach any person, address any securities-law violation, and can include penalties, disgorgement, and conduct prohibitions. A Section 8(d) stop order is narrower and surgical, operating only on the effectiveness of a particular registration statement and imposing no penalties of its own. The two can run in parallel against the same registrant, but cease-and-desist orders are published as administrative proceedings and are not part of this dataset.
AAERs and Litigation Releases are SEC-published narrative announcements describing enforcement actions. They may reference stop orders but are not the underlying order documents. STOP ORDER on EDGAR holds the orders themselves; AAER and LR serve as cross-reference, not substitute.
Under Rule 258 and Section 3(b)(2)(F), the Commission may suspend the qualification of a Regulation A offering statement (Form 1-A) for misstatements, omissions, or non-compliance. This is the Regulation A analogue to a Section 8(d) stop order, but the underlying regime is the Reg A exemption rather than full Securities Act registration, and the resulting orders are not designated STOP ORDER on EDGAR. A complete view of SEC-imposed offering suspensions requires combining both.
Pre- and post-effective amendments are the registrant's cure mechanism: voluntary issuer filings made in response to staff comments or self-identified deficiencies, with no Commission findings attached. They occupy the same problem space as Section 8(d) actions but sit on the opposite side of the cure-versus-coercion line. Amendment activity preceding a STOP ORDER appearance can be analytically informative, but amendments are never substitutes for the order itself.
The STOP ORDER dataset is defined by three jointly necessary properties: the document is issued by the Commission (not filed by a registrant), it invokes Section 8(d) of the Securities Act specifically, and it operates exclusively on the effectiveness of a registration statement with formal findings of material misstatement or omission. Registrant-initiated filings (RW, AW, S-1/A, F-1/A, POS AM) address the same underlying disclosure problems from the issuer side but carry no adjudicative findings. Other Commission orders (Section 8(b) refusals, Section 8(a) accelerations, Rule 258 Reg A suspensions, Section 12(k) trading suspensions, Section 8A/21C cease-and-desist orders) share the "SEC order" character but differ in timing, statute, scope, or remedy. Exchange and issuer actions on listing (Form 25, 25-NSE) and SEC enforcement publications (AAER, Litigation Releases) operate in adjacent regimes. None of these are interchangeable with STOP ORDER; the closest functional analogues for cross-dataset analysis are Rule 258 Reg A suspensions (parallel regime) and RW/AW (parallel issuer response).
Stop orders under Section 8(d) are rare, high-signal enforcement events, each a Commission finding that a registration statement contained material misstatements or omissions severe enough to suspend effectiveness. The user base is narrow and professional, drawing on the PDF order text, the entities array (CIK, stateOfIncorporation, fileNo, sic), filedAt, and items.
Defense-side litigators and former-enforcement attorneys treat the corpus as the precedent set for Section 8(d) practice. They read the PDF findings to identify fact patterns the Commission has actually escalated to suspension, then sort by filedAt, stateOfIncorporation, and sic when responding to Wells notices or arguing against a stop-order outcome.
Staff in Enforcement and Corporation Finance use prior orders as drafting templates: reusable findings language, citation conventions, and procedural posture. The PDF text supports drafting; fileNo and cik in the entities array tie an order back to the underlying registration file.
Capital-markets lawyers running registration due diligence mine the orders for categorically dangerous disclosure failures — sham revenues, undisclosed control persons, misdescribed operations, false auditor representations. They cross-reference cik and fileNo to pull the offending registration statement and feed examples into deal-side risk memos and disclosure checklists.
In-house compliance teams at registration-active issuers build red-flag libraries from recurring failure modes in the PDFs, then convert them into sub-certification questions, disclosure-committee checklists, and training material. filedAt is used to weight recent matters more heavily.
Law-and-finance scholars code the full corpus systematically: filedAt for time series, stateOfIncorporation and sic for distribution, and hand-coded variables from the PDF (nature of misstatement, contested vs. settled, remedial findings). Output is doctrinal and empirical scholarship on enforcement intensity.
Reporters at financial publications and analysts at short-research shops use the dataset to contextualize a new stop order against the historical population, quoting the Commission's findings from the PDF and looking for cluster patterns (industry, promoter networks, audit firms) tied to still-active issuers via cik.
Vendors building issuer-risk scores and adverse-action signals ingest the corpus keyed on cik, accessionNo, and filedAt. The PDF text supports downstream allegation extraction; the act and items fields support automated event classification inside entity-resolution pipelines.
Compliance and underwriting-committee analysts vet issuers, control persons, and affiliates before distribution or market-making. A historical stop order against the CIK is a categorical adverse fact feeding onboarding decisions, suitability determinations, and supervisory escalations.
Policy analysts inside the Commission and at self-regulatory organizations study how Section 8(d) is actually used: frequency over filedAt, jurisdictional distribution via stateOfIncorporation, and substantive categories from the PDF text, to inform registration-review staffing and rulemaking priorities.
Engineering teams building securities-enforcement research tools use the corpus as a clean, authoritative training and evaluation set. The PDF text supplies labeled Commission findings and conclusions; entities, fileNo, items, and accessionNo provide reliable join keys to other EDGAR datasets for retrieval indexes and fine-tuned models.
Most workflows depend on the same handful of fields: the PDF order text, entities[].cik, entities[].fileNo, entities[].sic, entities[].stateOfIncorporation, filedAt, and items.
Enforcement-defense counsel extract findings language from every stop-order PDF and tag each order with the type of misstatement (sham revenue, undisclosed control person, fabricated contracts, false auditor representation). Sorting by filedAt and sic produces a precedent index used to argue scope, severity, and proportionality when responding to a Wells notice or negotiating an outcome short of suspension.
Capital-markets diligence teams join entities[].cik and entities[].fileNo (typically 333-...) from metadata.json to the registrant's own EDGAR history, pulling the suspended S-1 or F-1 and any prior amendments. The paired record (order plus original registration) feeds disclosure checklists, deal-side risk memos, and "have we seen this fact pattern" review by underwriter counsel.
Risk-data vendors and broker-dealer onboarding desks key the dataset on entities[].cik and accessionNo and emit a categorical adverse-action flag whenever a CIK appears as a STOP ORDER subject. The flag attaches to entity-resolution graphs and triggers enhanced review for new accounts, market-making approvals, and distribution committee sign-off.
Law-and-finance researchers code the full record set into a panel: filedAt for time series, stateOfIncorporation for jurisdiction (including foreign codes such as T3), sic for industry distribution, and hand-coded PDF variables for nature of misstatement and procedural posture. Output is published empirical work on how frequently and against whom Section 8(d) is actually invoked.
Corporation Finance and Enforcement staff pull prior order PDFs to reuse caption structure, findings recitations, Section 8(d) citation conventions, and ordering language when drafting a new order. The items array and filedAt are used to retrieve the most recent comparable matter quickly.
In-house compliance officers at registration-active issuers parse the PDFs for recurring failure modes (undisclosed affiliations, share-ownership misstatements, use-of-proceeds misrepresentations) and convert them into sub-certification questions and disclosure-committee checklists. Recency is weighted by filedAt.
Analysts tracking SEC-imposed offering suspensions combine this dataset with Rule 258 / Section 3(b)(2)(F) Regulation A suspension orders to get a unified view across Securities Act registration and Reg A qualification. Join keys are entities[].cik for the registrant and filedAt for chronological alignment.
Engineering teams indexing securities-enforcement language use the PDF order text as labeled Commission findings and use accessionNo, entities[].cik, entities[].fileNo, and items as join keys to other EDGAR datasets. The corpus serves as an evaluation set for retrieval-augmented question answering on Section 8(d) doctrine and as fine-tuning data for adjudicative-order classification.
Financial reporters and short-research analysts scan order PDFs for recurring promoter names, auditor identities, registered agents, and addresses, then pivot on entities[].cik and sic to surface clusters spanning multiple suspended registrants. The output is published reporting tying a new stop order into a broader network of related issuers.
The Form STOP ORDER Files Dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers holding PDF documents and JSON metadata, covering filings from December 2012 onward. Three access methods are available.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-stop-order-files.json
Returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total records, total size, form types, container format, file types), a direct download URL for the full archive, and the full list of container files with per-container size, record count, updated timestamp, and download URL. Poll this endpoint to detect which monthly containers changed in the latest refresh and decide which ones to re-download. This endpoint does not require an API key.
1
{
2
"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a30-93c3-bed0f797b551",
3
"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-stop-order-files.zip",
4
"name": "Form STOP ORDER Files Dataset",
5
"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:34:30.467Z",
6
"earliestSampleDate": "2012-12-01",
7
"totalRecords": 62,
8
"totalSize": 7164639,
9
"formTypes": ["STOP ORDER"],
10
"containerFormat": "ZIP",
11
"fileTypes": ["PDF", "JSON"],
12
"containers": [
13
{
14
"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-stop-order-files/2025/2025-11.zip",
15
"key": "2025/2025-11.zip",
16
"size": 13818783,
17
"records": 154,
18
"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:34:30.467Z"
19
}
20
]
21
}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-stop-order-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing every monthly container. Use this for an initial bulk load. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-stop-order-files/2025/2025-11.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container ZIP listed in the index's containers array, useful for incremental updates after the initial load. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers EDGAR submissions published under the literal form type STOP ORDER, which is the EDGAR designation reserved for Commission orders issued under Section 8(d) of the Securities Act of 1933 that suspend the effectiveness of a registration statement on findings of material misstatement or omission.
One record is a single EDGAR accession in which the SEC has posted a Section 8(d) stop order against a named registrant. The accession folder contains the Commission's stop-order PDF and a metadata.json file that normalizes the EDGAR submission header, the document manifest, and the affected registrant's identifying metadata (including cik, fileNo, sic, and stateOfIncorporation).
The Securities and Exchange Commission itself is the filer. Stop orders are Commission-authored adjudicative orders, not registrant disclosures, and every accession in this dataset carries the institutional SEC-as-filer CIK prefix 9999999997. The registrant whose registration statement is being suspended is the subject of the action and appears inside the entities array, not as the EDGAR submitter.
The dataset is EDGAR-native and begins in December 2012, the earliest digital STOP ORDER accession available under this form code, and continues to the present with new accessions added whenever the Commission concludes a Section 8(d) proceeding. Pre-EDGAR stop orders exist in Commission releases and the Federal Register but fall outside the scope of this dataset.
The dataset is distributed as one ZIP container per calendar month under form-stop-order-files/<YYYY>/<YYYY-MM>.zip. Each container holds one subfolder per accession (named with the 18-digit dash-stripped accession number) containing the stop-order PDF and a metadata.json file. No HTML, SGML, or XBRL artifacts are included.
There is no scheduled cadence. Section 8(d) actions are event-driven and exceptional, so new records appear only when the Commission concludes a Section 8(d) proceeding. Some months contain no new records; busier months can contain roughly a dozen.
RW and AW are registrant-initiated withdrawals of a registration statement, voluntary and non-adjudicative; STOP ORDER records are Commission-imposed and carry formal findings of material misstatement or omission. Section 8(b) refusal orders are also Commission orders against a registration statement, but they only operate pre-effective, whereas a Section 8(d) stop order can suspend a statement that has already become effective. Only Section 8(d) stop orders are included in this dataset.