XBRL US Offers US GAAP Pension Analyzer Tool

XBRL US, the nonprofit consortium for XBRL reporting in the United States, has published the US GAAP Pension Analyzer, a new online tool that runs a set of rules against the pension disclosure within an XBRL-formatted financial statement.

Available for free to public company reporting managers, the US GAAP Pension Analyzer was created to help companies identify and correct errors specific to their pension footnote before submitting their XBRL financials to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system.

“We've seen a high level of inconsistency in the corporate XBRL data produced on pensions,” stated Pranav Ghai, co-founder of Calcbench, an online, interactive data platform. "This makes using the information much more difficult, and could translate into inaccurate data for investors, analysts, regulators and the media. Clearly public companies would benefit from more guidance in working with the concepts and structure of the US GAAP Taxonomy related to pensions."

To review their pension footnotes, companies can upload their filing through a secure system to the Pension Analyzer, which runs a series of rules against the XBRL document, checking each concept and combination of concepts to identify potential problems. A report is generated of these problem areas, which can include incorrect sign (negative or positive), invalid axis/member and axis/line item combinations, problems in roll forwards, missing values and incorrect dates. The report also provides detailed instructions on resolving the issues.

The Pension Analyzer, available here, is based on the XBRL Consistency Suite, a tool that performs a complete check on a company’s full XBRL financials to identify and help resolve issues.

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