Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

July 12, 2014

SEC Bite?

Filed under: Government,SEC,XBRL — Patrick Durusau @ 2:12 pm

SEC Starts Enforcing XBRL Mandate by Michael Cohn.

From the post:

The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun sending letters to public companies that fail to file their financials with all the necessary data using Extensible Business Reporting Language technology.

The SEC began requiring the largest public companies to file their financial statements using XBRL in 2009 and phased in the requirements for smaller issuers over the next two years. XBRL technology uses a data-tagging format that is supposed to make it easier for investors and analysts to compare financial information across companies and industries. Problems with the technology and the inconsistency of the tags used by companies have limited XBRL’s usefulness to many investors, however.

Nevertheless, the SEC has continued to work with vendors and companies on refining the tags and with the Financial Accounting Standards Board on regularly updating the XBRL taxonomy to adjust for any changes in U.S. GAAP. This month, the IRS’s Division of Corporate Finance started sending letters to corporations that have not been meeting the mandate.

As they say, “…it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow anyone some good.” 😉

Assuming that the SEC becomes persistent with its letters and one presumes some threats of enforcement action, those late to the XBRL party will be adapting their information systems to produce the required reports.

As I pointed out in 2012, topic maps are relevant to the transition to XBRL because:

  1. Some organizations will have legacy accounting systems that require mapping to XBRL.
  2. Even organizations that have transitioned to XBRL will have legacy data that has not.
  3. Transitions to XBRL by different organizations may not reflect the same underlying semantics.

See XBRL.org for details on XBRL.

I first saw this in a tweet by Open Data 500.

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