XBRL News about real-time reporting, filings lessons and APIs
Here is our pick of the 3 most important XBRL news stories from the last week.
1 XBRL Switzerland and DCARPE Alliance Association enter collaboration
The DCARPE Alliance Association and the XBRL Switzerland Association have agreed to cooperate by initiating a joint working group to further develop and build community around the adoption of the Decentralised Continuous Audit and Reporting Protocol Ecosystem currently being developed on the basis of the XBRL standard for digital financial reporting.
Here’s a piece of news on our own behalf: The Swiss XBRL jurisdiction is establishing a joint working group with DCARPE Alliance to explore the cutting edge of continuous reporting and auditing on the blockchain. This allows for fascinating fresh perspectives in an otherwise rather static field, including changes to the auditing business model. Let us know if you’re interested in joining the working group! Note that the author has a commercial interest in this topic.
2 For the EU: Lessons to be learned about digital filings
Globally, regulations requiring public companies to provide information in an XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format have steadily increased. But XBRL implementation has faced some challenges, particularly in the United States. The quality of the information provided in the XBRL reports is one such challenge.
CFA Institute’s Mohini Singh talks about the issues observed in the years of filing under the US SEC’s mandate, which ought not to be repeated in the EU. What appears to be particularly irksome is that the ESEF audit only extends to the human readable iXBRL tags, whereas the source remains unaudited, even though that’s what’s being pulled into automated models.
3 SEC filings data now available via APIs
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched data.sec.gov for beta testing by developers. This new page hosts RESTful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that deliver JSON-formatted filings data to external users, as well as SEC web pages.
It’s great news that the SEC is beta-testing the distribution of XBRL filings data via APIs. We can only join XBRL International’s hope that the SEC will soon upgrade its delivery format to the recently released xBRL-JSON specification.
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Christian Dreyer CFA is well known in Swiss Fintech circles as an expert in XBRL and financial reporting for investors.
We have a self-imposed constraint of 3 news stories each week because we serve busy senior leaders in Fintech who need just enough information to get on with their job.
For context on XBRL please read this introduction to our XBRL Week in 2016 and read articles tagged XBRL in our archives.
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