The XBRL US Center for Data Quality has begun a public review period on July 19th, 2017, for the fifth set of proposed rules to provide guidance and aid for issuers in identifying errors in their XBRL SEC filings. The Data Quality Committee rules aim to help filers limit mistakes and avoid data inconsistencies that can adversely affect analysis of reported financial information.

On August 1, 2017, new rules that require funds to describe their securities lending activities will go into effect.

Through Novaworks Submission Service (NSS), it’s possible to automatically schedule filings. This is an extremely handy tool to help streamline your submission process, as not only can you prepare your filing in advance, you can also have GoFiler send it to the SEC for you and notify you and your production team of the filing’s status.

In March, the SEC introduced proposed changes to include Inline XBRL Tagging in financial filings. We covered these proposed amendments in this blog post. The public comment period recently ended on May 16th, and the comments are available to read here. XBRL US offered one such comment on the proposed requirements to include Inline XBRL in financial filings, and in it expressed agreement that inclusion on Inline XBRL will help to improve the quality of reported structured financial data while reducing the burden on filers.

Every year, FASB releases a new version of the US GAAP XBRL taxonomy. Depending on the individual filer, adopting this new taxonomy can be easy or potentially require a fair amount of work. While FASB does have release notes for the taxonomy, there is little guidance on how to adopt the new changes. In this blog, we will be going over what can change in a taxonomy update, how to identify those changes, and how to determine what, if anything, needs to be done to your filing to incorporate the changes.

Many EDGAR filing forms have fees associated with them. Determining the fee associated with a filing is extremely important and can be straightforward. However, there are times when the calculation can also become more complicated. Fee offsets can be a source of confusion for many filers and our support team often gets asked questions about how to prepare an EDGAR filing when fee offsets are involved.

The SEC voted on March 1, 2017 to adopt rule and form amendments to make it easier for investors and other market participants to locate and access exhibits in registration statements and periodic reports that were originally submitted with prior filings. This ruling requires issuers to include a hyperlink to each exhibit in the filing’s exhibit index.

With the changing pace of technology, companies like Microsoft need to be vigilant about security issues. Every office has experienced it – that one user that gets a virus and the whole office becomes infected in a matter of minutes. To combat this problem Microsoft has started to force computers to update automatically. Gone are the days of Windows XP where users could continue to hit “Postpone” for weeks on end. Now we have the new Windows Update that installs and restarts your computer for you. Instead of coming into work to a virus attack, users are now unfortunately coming into work to find their documents and applications closed and their computers restarted.

The next N-MFP filing due for money market funds must be submitted to the EDGAR System on the new form, Form N-MFP2. This new version of the form became effective on October 14, 2016.

Each October, the SEC sets the filing fee rate for the fiscal year, which is the rate the SEC believes will result in collections that equal annual statutory target amounts for the SEC. For the SEC’s 2017 fiscal year, this statutory target amount is $585 million, which resulted in a fee rate of $115.90 per million dollars. Throughout the year, the SEC may make adjustments to the fee rates in order to reach their target amount. The new fee rate became effective October 1, 2016 and should be used to calculate fees for filings until September 30, 2017 or the SEC adjusts the rate.

Update: The November 2 XBRL US SEC Filer Workshop has been cancelled.

XBRL US is hosting a one-day workshop for SEC filers on Wednesday, November 2, 2016 at the AICPA offices in New York City. Topics covered by the workshop will include the changes to financial reporting that regulators are proposing, including the permitted use of Inline XBRL and revisions to disclosure requirements.

If you are reporting transactions on EDGAR Form 4 or 5, then you may have questions about the Transaction Code field. This field is required data in both Table I and Table II of these forms.

In XBRL as in other data reporting systems, calculations show relationships among data. Since XBRL defines calculations in this way without validating the accuracy of their results, it is important to examine the results of calculations in XBRL filings. Many preparers may assume that when a calculation does not add up, it is due to rounding, but this may not be a safe assumption.