The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s New Regulation S-K 1300, Disclosure Requirements for Mining Registrants; What Every Minerals Geologist Needs to Know

Until most recently, field geologists employed by mineral exploration and mining
companies, with stock listings in the United States (U.S.), had little reason to be concerned about public disclosure of their data generated by field mapping, geophysical
surveys, geochemical sampling, drilling, and analytical work. Public disclosures of
results from such activities were often made by senior exploration or mine operations management, based on the data and information fed to them by their hands-on
geologists. This situation had the potential to cause a disconnect between the persons
generating the results and those disclosing them—if they were disclosed at all. For
those disclosures, officers, senior management and investor relations staff of companies registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relied on a
set of general and brief guidelines set forth in the SEC Industry Guide 7 (Guide 7),
which was based loosely upon the 1980 U.S. Geological Survey Circular 831.
Prior to Guide 7, and outside of the U.S., guidelines and/or requirements for public disclosure of technical exploration results and data had, for the most part, not yet
been developed. However, governmental concern in Australia, in the 1980s, regarding
fraudulent disclosure of exploration results and mineral reserves for certain projects
resulted in the formation of the Joint Ore Reserves Committee (JORC) of the Australasian Institute for Mining and Metallurgy and the Australian Stock Exchange and
the subsequent enactment of the JORC Code in 1989. Despite promulgation of the
JORC Code, in February 1999, it was revealed that the publicly disclosed mineral reserves of more than 200 million gold ounces for the Busang gold exploration project in
Indonesia, operated by the Canadian-listed junior company, Bre-X, was fraudulent.
This infamous, watershed event caused radical changes in public disclosure requirements and responsibilities to begin to take place worldwide. Canada was first to react
to the Bre-X fraud by enacting National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101) in 2001, which
consisted of a comprehensive set of technical guidelines and regulations pertaining
to public disclosure of geologic results and data for projects ranging from grassroots
exploration to mine operations.
In the U.S., work to revise SEC Industry Guide 7 public disclosure requirements
began, as early as 1989, with the formation of the first of a series of committees assembled by the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME). After much
effort by SME and other groups to encourage the SEC to update its technical disclosure guidelines and requirements, in line with those of Canadian, Australian, South
African, and other jurisdictions, SEC Regulation S-K 1300 For Mining Property Disclosure was approved on October 31, 2018. S-K 1300 effectively replaces Guide 7.
Key Words: US SEC, Regulation S-K 1300, Mining Disclosures