Written by edgaragentsdb on April 25, 2018
Last month, the SEC approved FASB’s 2018 SEC Reporting Taxonomy and 2018 GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy.
LINKS:
Issuers will implement (with Egdar Agents’ help!) the SEC-approved taxonomies to select the tags that are attached to each piece of data and textual information in financial statements for their XBRL filings. Tag selection by your K and Q preparers is a critical step in making XBRL filings searchable. This is key for investors who need to access comparable pieces of financial statement data across issuers.
During the comment period, the FASB heard the comment that XBRL preparers and investors would value efforts that would make tag selection more consistent across companies, which would improve the accuracy and comparability of data in the XBRL database. This has always been a criticism of XBRL and the creation of too many custom extensions. To this, FASB submitted a plan to the SEC for making changes to the GAAP taxonomy for improving data quality.
This 2018 GAAP taxonomy contains updates for accounting standards and other endorsed improvements. The new SEC Reporting Taxonomy contains elements for financial schedules that are required by the SEC, condensed consolidating financial information for guarantors, and disclosures about oil and gas activities. It also contains dimensional elements for items commonly used by GAAP filers but not specified under GAAP.
One of the biggest areas of change, effective January 1, 2018, in the GAAP taxonomy are those updates to reflect the new standard on revenue recognition and the prominence of on adding U.S. GAAP references.
LINK: FASB Release Notes
One modification FASB has applied is the move away from annual updates to the GAAP taxonomy to pushing updates in-step with non-calendared changes to accounting standards are updated. This 2018 GAAP taxonomy the last that will be produced via the annual update process. Edgar Agents will contiguously follow all updates for our clients.
