XBRL US DQC approves more new validation rules
The XBRL US Data Quality Committee (DQC) approved version 17 of its freely-available validation rules and guidance in January. This latest update adds eight new rules, taking the total to 91 and coming into effect for filings submitted on or after 1 May 2022.
These validation rules – which apply to hundreds of reporting concepts – can be incorporated into software tools to provide automated checks on financials before they are submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). When a possible error or inconsistency is detected, filers receive detailed information on how to resolve it. The DQC’s ongoing work to develop these validation rules therefore provides a hugely important boost to the quality of data received by the SEC. A growing selection of DQC rules is also being incorporated into a DQC Rules Taxonomy by the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which means that these quality checks are increasingly becoming a set of mandatory pre-filing tests.
The XBRL US website offers a wealth of useful information. The best place to start is the list of rules, where you can find further information by clicking on the name of each rule, and there is also detailed DQC Approved Guidance linked on the right. Some rules have a “view results” link to display data on how often the rule has been triggered by filings submitted to the SEC over time, which is aggregated here; company-specific results are available here.
For US filers, it is also possible to check data quality against the validation rules online, free of charge here, and there’s a Q&A available on how to interpret warnings.
Read more here (scroll down for the newest rules).
