XBRL US has begun a public exposure period for rules developed by its Data Quality Committee, which aims to improve the quality of financial filings using the interactive Extensible Business Reporting Language format mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The committee, funded by the Center for Data Quality, is developing guidance and validation rules that can prevent or detect inconsistencies or errors in XBRL data filed with the SEC and focuses on data quality issues that adversely affect data analysis. The committee is responsible for developing guidance for uniform, consistent tagging of financial data, and for clarifying those specific circumstances where custom tags are appropriate, as well as developing automated validation rules to verify compliance with the committee’s guidance and prevent or detect tagging errors.
Adoption of XBRL by investors and financial analysts has been hampered by the inconsistent quality of the filings.
The public review that launched Thursday contains seven proposed validation rules that test selected attributes reported for over 2,400 individual elements and certain broad classes of elements (such as Document and Entity Information).
XBRL is a technology standard to electronically communicate business and financial data. The XBRL standard has been implemented around the world for the reporting of company financials, government expenditures and corporate actions, among other reporting domains.
The Data Quality Committee provides technical implementation support to the XBRL US Center for Data Quality, which was formed by XBRL US and an alliance of five companies. The American Institute of CPAs is a member of the center and is represented on the committee.
“In order for investors and other consumers to fully realize the benefits that XBRL can deliver, better guidance and automated rules for mitigating errors in XBRL data is needed. Public review and input is an important part of this process,” said AICPA President and CEO Barry C. Melancon, who chairs the XBRL US board of directors. “The comments provided over the course of the next 60 days will help the Committee improve the guidance and rules that will reduce inconsistencies or errors in XBRL data filed with the SEC.”
Comments received during the 60-day public review period will be evaluated for incorporation into final rules that will be made freely available and will be contributed to the open source Arelle XBRL platform. The public will be able to review a plain English description of the rules and submit comments. Developers can download the open source code to incorporate into their own software, to use as a reference implementation against their software and to provide feedback.
To participate in the public review, visit
AICPA members are being encouraged to visit the
