XBRL US submitted a comment letter to the Regulatory Oversight Committee (ROC) in response to a Consultative Document on LEI Eligibility for General Government Entities. Our comment letter made the following points:
- Collecting government financial data in U.S. markets, in an efficient, automatable fashion is becoming a more likely scenario, given recent initiatives driving greater standardization, such as the GREAT Act for grants reporting, and the mandate for XBRL in the state of Florida.
- The availability of government identifiers for these entities would vastly improve the usefulness of the standardized, machine-readable government financial data that will be produced through these initiatives.
- The U.S. has over 90,000 sub-sovereign governments falling into a large number of categories and with varied types of interrelationships. The current approach to establishing governmental relationships proposed by the ROC will not adequately address the complexities of U.S. government entities.
- Many U.S. local governments are small, may not understand the benefit of the LEI, and may see the registration fee as a deterrent.
The XBRL US letter goes on to recommend that the ROC consider how the LEI could be adapted to better fit the framework of U.S. federal, state and local government reporting. And in addition, it recommends building awareness among U.S. governments to help them understand the benefits of identifiers. We also suggest that it may be more expedient to allow automatic registration of small government organizations, potentially through an organization such as U.S. Census, the MSRB or U.S. Treasury.
Read the consultative document.
Read the XBRL US letter: XBRL US Response to ROC LEI 12_6_2019
