This Week in XBRL: Breaking Down the SEC's XBRL Review

In a continued effort to educate on the development of XBRL technology in industries such as financial services (and beyond), Merrill Corporation will share articles and columns published on the topic.

A couple weeks ago, we discussed the SEC's review of initial financial statements filed in XBRL. Overall, the review was positive, and while the SEC did go into specifics, we found a more concise breakdown of the SEC's thoughts.

Among the more intriguing aspects, as put forth by Moody, Famiglietti and Andronico include: 

• New filers have asked whether the rendered version of the XBRL financial statements need to look exactly the same as the HTML financial statements. The answer is no; filers should concentrate on the quality of the tagging rather than trying to make the two documents look exactly the same.
• Filers are incorrectly entering an amount with a negative value. Most XBRL tagged numbers are positive even if the HTML financial statements show a credit or negative value.
• Filers should not be extending when a US GAAP taxonomy element is already available Extending should only happen when there is a material difference between a standard element and the filer’s financial statement line item.
• Filers should ensure that parenthetical amounts in the financial statements and monetary amounts found in subscripted text.
• Each tagged item must have a unit attribute assigned to it.

In our opinion, the information provided by the SEC is extremely useful, just as the "review of a review" is. If the SEC can recognize that their points are coming across clearly to those that need to hear it, the open dialogue will be able to continue as the XBRL transition continues.

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