FASB Offers XBRL Implementation Guide

The Financial Accounting Standards Board made available the first in a series of implementation guides Monday to help users of its U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy understand how disclosures are structured with Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, technology.

The initial implementation guide is for the subsequent events standard. The purpose of the guide is to demonstrate the modeling for disclosures required about events occurring subsequent to the end of a public company’s reporting period. The modeling has been completed using the elements in FASB’s U.S. GAAP Taxonomy. The examples are not intended to encompass all of the potential modeling configurations or to dictate the appearance and structure of a company’s XBRL documents.

In addition to the implementation guide, the FASB also issued Definition Components & Structure, the first style guide of the FASB U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy Style Guide Series. Also available on FASB’s Web site, the style guides provide additional insight into design criteria and are offered as a reference for users of the taxonomy.

The U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy is a list of computer-readable tags in XBRL that allows companies to tag precisely the thousands of pieces of financial data that are included in typical long-form financial statements and related footnote disclosures. The tags allow computers to automatically search for, assemble, and process data so it can be readily accessed and analyzed by investors, analysts, journalists, and regulators.

In early 2010, FASB’s parent organization, the Financial Accounting Foundation, assumed maintenance responsibilities for the taxonomy, and, along with the FASB, assembled a team of technical staff dedicated to updating the taxonomy for changes in U.S. GAAP, identifying best practices in taxonomy extensions, and technical enhancements.

Separately, on Friday, the Securities and Exchange announced that its interactive data test suite has been updated. For a summary of changes, click here. This version of the test suite corresponds to the latest version of the EDGAR Filer Manual (Volume II ) Version 22.

Comments on the test suite may be directed to the comment form by indicating “Interactive Data Test Suite” in the subject field. The purpose of the public test suite is to assist developers of software that must validate Interactive Data prior to its submission to EDGAR.

The test suite consists of many small interactive data instances, schemas and linkbases that are categorized as to whether they violate a validation check, and if so, what validation check they violate and whether that would result in a warning, or in an error that would cause the interactive data to be rejected.

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