Formats are sometimes mistaken as financial data standards by regulators, government agencies and businesses. It’s a misunderstanding with significant consequences for comprehensive, comparable, interoperable data collection and use.
UPC codes. Shipping containers. Most people understand that the introduction of these kinds of standards revolutionized an existing process, making it better, faster, cheaper, by establishing a single method of doing something that is used by many. UPC codes made it possible to track purchasing habits worldwide. Shipping containers dramatically reduced the cost and time involved in shipping goods cross-country. Financial data standards can be similarly revolutionary – reducing processing costs, enabling automation and greater timeliness, providing for validation checks to improve accuracy.
Every once in awhile a data collection process comes along that is ripe for standardization – the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Form 5500 Annual Report for pension fund data is one such system. The DOL’s Employee Benefits Securities Administration (EBSA) published proposal to modernize the data collection process of the annual report and corresponding schedules, with an eye towards giving data users the ability to perform better analysis of individual plans, multi-plan comparisons and trends; aid the agencies efforts at enforcement and at monitoring compliance issues; assist auditors; and provide new research opportunities.
Inline XBRL could just tip the scale towards the adoption of standards in corporate actions.
On September 30, XBRL US submitted a comment letter responding to the SEC proposal on Disclosure Update and Simplification. Key recommendations made in the letter include: Ensure that all facts that companies are required to report to investors be provided in a computer-readable format to facilitate greater ease of analysis, Require the use of standardized […more]
The national consortium for
the business reporting standard
