January 2017 Newsletter

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU agency responsible for the rules that govern EU securities regulation and the conduct of EU public markets, announced yesterday that starting in 2020, public companies that prepare consolidated IFRS financial statements will provide them in Inline XBRL.

Read more from XBRL International: https://www.xbrl.org/news/esma-announces-inline-xbrl-requirement/
Read the ESMA release: https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-proposes-new-digital-format-issuers%E2%80%99-financial-reporting

The new EDGAR filer manual draft was published with an effective date of December 12, 2016.

Read more: https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/edmanuals.htm

The SEC has updated its Inline XBRL viewer with these changes:

• Text blocks using continuations are now displayed in their entirety.
• Highlighting for facts has been changed from dashed lines into the following:
  • Text block facts are marked with lines in the left “gutter”, with nested facts resulting in nested gutters
  • All other facts are marked with lines on the top and bottom.

Read more on inline XBRL: https://www.sec.gov/structureddata/osd-inline-xbrl.html

Link to the SEC’s inline viewer https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=ixviewer/samples/bst/out/bst-20160930.htm

Learn more about inline: https://xbrl.us/home/tag/inline-xbrl/

The XBRL US Data Quality Committee announced that it had published the third set of approved rules and guidance developed by the Data Quality Committee (DQC), which are now freely available for issuers to use to identify and correct errors in their filings.

Read the release: https://xbrl.us/news/dqc-20160126

Review the rules: https://xbrl.us/rules-guidance

The goal of the working group is to establish a standardized method to represent a token, a digital representation of an asset, which could be debt, equity, cash or a physical asset, across all blockchain networks. Standards would be used to eliminate transactional friction and reduce processing costs; enable automation and provenance tracking; and allow interoperability of transactions on a global scale.

Read the release: https://xbrl.us/news/20161214/

On December 5, 2016, XBRL US submitted a comment letter responding to the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) proposal to modernize Form 5500 Annual Return/Report filed by employee benefit plans. Global pension assets were estimated at $35.4 trillion at the end of 2015. The EBSA makes this data available to the public in CSV files today and the DOL proposal seeks to make this information more data mineable and accessible for research, policy analysis, and enforcement purposes. The XBRL US letter recommends creating a single agreed-upon financial data standard for investors and regulators to provide automated, understandable and more easily useable data for all data users.

Read the blog and letter: https://xbrl.us/dol5500/

The XBRL US Data Quality Committee responded to FASB’s request for comment on significant proposed changes to be made to the 2017 Taxonomy.

Read the letter: https://xbrl.us/news/dqc-20161223/

The paper addresses the significant challenges in data submission and collection today between business and government, including inconsistent data standards required from agency to agency and even within a single agency, lack of standard identifiers and duplication of data reported. The paper recommends establishing consistent standards to be used by all agencies and all reporting entities for reported facts and identifiers; and the establishment of a single master taxonomy and data collection system with oversight from a single government agency.

Read the paper: https://xbrl.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Financial-Data-Standards-to-Reduce-Cost-Reduce-Burden.pdf
View the infographic for problems in government reporting today: https://xbrl.us/infographic/reduce-burden-cut-spending/
View the infographic for how to save billions in government reporting: https://xbrl.us/infographic/howto-save-billions-govt-spending/

A new blog called Point of View (PoV) has been introduced to express the vision of XBRL US and its members. New posts include:

• XML, CSV, XBRL – What’s the Difference: https://xbrl.us/versus/
• Components of a Financial Data Standard: https://xbrl.us/financial-data-standard/
• How to Cut Billions Out of Government Spending: https://xbrl.us/cut-billions-out-of-govt/
• Pension Fund Reporting – a Process Ripe for Standardization: https://xbrl.us/dol5500/

Read the latest PoV topics: https://xbrl.us/xusnews/pov
Got a Point of View to share? Send an email to info@xbrl.us to get involved.

Several recently published case studies demonstrate how XBRL helps user audiences reduce costs and increase timeliness:

• Student-run investment fund at California State University – Northridge: https://xbrl.us/research/timely-affordable-data-analysis/
• Global data provider, Morningstar reduces processing time 90%: https://xbrl.us/research/reduce-processing-time/
• Research analysts at Accounting Observer cut 72 hours off data collection time: https://xbrl.us/research/save-time-data-collection/
• Auditors at BDO conduct more robust analysis, save time: https://xbrl.us/research/audit-analysis-save-data-collection-time/

Got research or an idea to explore? Send an email to info@xbrl.us to let us know about it.

Daniel Boff of the U.S. Department of Energy; Tom Tansy of the Sunspec Alliance and Campbell Pryde of XBRL US discussed the DOE’s Orange Button program, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot initiative. Orange Button seeks to make solar energy cost-competitive with other forms of electricity by funding cooperative research, development, demonstration, and deployment projects by private companies, universities, state and local governments, nonprofit organizations, and national laboratories to drive down the cost of solar electricity to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour.

Read about the DOE Orange Button program: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/orange-button-solar-bankability-data-advance-transactions-and-access-sb-data
Watch the webinar replay: https://xbrl.us/events/doe-orange-button-solar-financing/

• The Domain Steering Committee meeting will be Thursday, February 2 at 4 PM ET.
• The Communications Steering Committee meeting will be Wednesday, February 22 at 10 AM ET.

XBRL US Members are invited to attend and get involved. Email membership@xbrl.us for details.

Thomson Reuters provides professionals with the intelligence, technology and human expertise they need to find trusted answers. https://xbrl.us/member/thomson-reuters

Find out more about the benefits of membership and how to become involved by visiting http://xbrl.us/membership.

Read: http://blog.intrinio.com/normalized-xbrl-data