On April 3rd from 1:00 to 2:30 PM EST, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) will host a webinar covering 2018 GAAP and SEC taxonomy improvements. During the webinar, the FASB staff will demonstrate how to apply the new modeling using example disclosures and discuss the new 2018 SEC Reporting Taxonomy.

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.

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.

The 2017 US GAAP Taxonomy is going to introduce some rather drastic changes to the way XBRL is prepared. While these changes are proposed for only a few small sections of the taxonomy for now, it looks like this is going to be the shape of things to come for XBRL.

The XBRL US Center for Data Quality has launched a public review for five new proposed validation rules. Additionally, the Data Quality Committee (DQC) has released proposed additions to the previous rule regarding inappropriate negative values.

SEC staff recently released observations regarding registrants’ use of custom axis elements (or custom dimensions) in XBRL reports. The results of their analysis showed that while the overall use of custom axis elements has been declining since 2013, over half of all filers continue to use one or more custom axis elements in their annual reports.

On March 7, the Securities and Exchange Commission updated EDGAR to accept the US GAAP 2016 taxonomy among other new taxonomies. While this taxonomy should not be used for reports with a reporting period that ends before March 7, 2015, it’s a good idea to transition your SEC filings as soon as possible for reporting periods that end after March 7.