XBRL US announced today that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has incorporated freely available validation rules into the 2020 release of the US GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy. The rules, developed by the XBRL US Data Quality Committee (DQC) are used by public company filers to identify and resolve errors in their XBRL financials prior to submission to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The DQC has been building rules since 2015 and has introduced 10 rulesets covering multiple categories of errors, such as signage (negative or positive) problems, errors in the use of dates, calculation mistakes, and the inappropriate use of axes when creating financial tables. In 2018, the DQC began introducing rules based on the IFRS Taxonomy, to support foreign private issuers that rely on that taxonomy.
Members of the DQC are securities analysts, filing agents, and public company preparers, with participation from the FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) as observers. A subcommittee of the DQC convenes on a bi-weekly basis to review and refine rules. Their work is based on an in-depth analysis of how the taxonomy and data produced are being used by filers and consumers. They also analyze FASB and IASB taxonomy changes to their respective taxonomies, and incorporate feedback received from the marketplace through public reviews. The DQC meets with the SEC twice a year to update the Commission on findings and the status of upcoming rule releases.
The 2020 US GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy has been published incorporating DQC rules that check for negative values, inappropriate use of axes and incorrect use of calculations; additional rules will be incorporated into future releases of the taxonomy.
“Data quality is of critical importance to investors, analysts, regulators and researchers who rely on corporate public company data,” said Louis Matherne, Chief of Taxonomy Development at the FASB, “The DQC rules, developed by an industry-led consortium, along with the implementation guides and other applications developed by the FASB, are important tools that can be used by preparers to improve quality and consistency, and we encourage their use.”
DQC rules can be accessed through in the US GAAP Taxonomy, using the FASB Viewer. Under the Taxonomy drop-down, select XBRL US DQC Rules Taxonomy which is a subcategory under the US GAAP 2020-01-31 Taxonomy. View the rules in the concept-rule network browser drop-down.
To access and use the full rulesets, preparers should use XBRL preparation tools that have been certified to successfully run the DQC rules; a list of certified tools can be found here: https://xbrl.us/data-quality/certification/. Alternatively, the rules can be run on the XBRL US site here: https://xbrl.us/data-quality/filing-results/check-filing/.
The work of the DQC is funded by the XBRL US Center for Data Quality, an industry consortium dedicated to improving the usefulness of XBRL-formatted data. Members of the Center are the AICPA, Altova, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Certent, Datatracks, Donnelley Financial Solutions (DFIN), P3Data Systems, Toppan Merrill, RDG Filings, and Workiva. To learn more about the Center, go to: https://xbrl.us/data-quality/center/
