Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2017

Issuers encouraged to use the newly published rules to identify and resolve data quality errors

XBRL US announced that it had published the third set of freely available, approved rules and guidance developed by the Data Quality Committee (DQC). These rules are designed for issuers to use to identify and correct errors in their SEC filings. Software and service providers are expected to have incorporated the rules into their tools, effective immediately. The DQC, which is funded through the Center for Data Quality, is responsible for 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 new rules published in the latest set cover additional elements that should not be reported as negative values in an XBRL document. The new rules also clarify the appropriate combinations of members and axes, providing additional tests of members and axes that issuers can apply. A total of twelve rules have been published. The DQC rules help SEC filers identify and address potential problem areas such as negative value errors, incorrect element relationships, the use of deprecated elements that are no longer supported, the inappropriate use of axes and member combinations, and erroneous use of dates. These are common problems for filers and correcting these errors can significantly improve the quality of a company’s filing.

“More and more large global data and analytical tool providers rely on XBRL-formatted financials for the corporate data they provide to investors,” said Campbell Pryde, President and CEO of XBRL US, “That makes it even more critical for public company filers to use these freely available rules to make sure they are producing the best quality financials.”

Members of the XBRL US Center for Data Quality include Altova, the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), Certent, DataTracks, DisclosureNet, Merrill Corporation, P3 Data Systems, Vintage, a division of PR Newswire, and Workiva. For more information on the XBRL US Data Quality Committee and the Center for Data Quality, go to: http://xbrl.us/data-quality

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