The pace of regulatory developments in financial reporting has accelerated significantly. Standard setters and regulators have transformed both accounting standards and the format of financial reporting, resulting in vast changes to not only how accounting is recorded, but also how financial results are reported. Proper handling of these accounting and reporting changes is a key factor in the effectiveness of a company’s external financial reporting function.
On March 20, 2019, the SEC adopted final rule amendments, in connection with the FAST Act, which have expanded the scope of XBRL tagging requirements to the cover page of Forms 8-K, 10-Q, 10-K, 20-F, and 40-F (annual reports) using Inline XBRL. The cover page tagging will be phased-in beginning in July/August 2019.
The SEC has adopted final rule amendments, in connection with the FAST Act, which have expanded the amount of information subject to the SEC’s XBRL-tagging requirement. The rule includes the tagging of all information on the cover page of Forms 8-K, 10-Q, 10-K, 20-F, and 40-F (annual reports) using Inline XBRL.
In March 2019, the SEC adopted final amendments to its rules which expand the XBRL tagging requirement to Form 8-K filings. And it’s not just for selected Form 8-K filings; it’s for all of them.
Form 8-K is the interim report that companies must file with the SEC to announce major events that shareholders should know about. Previously the Form 8-K did not have any XBRL structured data tagging required (with the exception of when a Form 8-K included restated financials that were originally filed with XBRL), but it will soon require the inclusion of computer-searchable XBRL tags. Regulators, registrants and investors will need to be aware of the changes to take advantage of, and comply with, the new requirement.
in XBRL, XBRL for US GAAP and IFRS filers, SEC, Capital Markets & Compliance, Periodic & Interim Reporting
The SEC has intertwined various XBRL tagging questions within the 46 questions asked in its Request for Comment on Earnings Releases and Quarterly Reports. The 46 questions focus on the two communications that U.S. companies utilize to disclose their quarterly financial information – the Form 10-Q and the earnings release. However, the SEC requires that only one of those documents, the Form 10-Q, be tagged with computer-readable XBRL. This creates a situation whereby various changes, as contemplated in the SEC request, will need to consider the implications to XBRL-tagged data and the increasing number of investors that rely on it.
in XBRL, XBRL for US GAAP and IFRS filers, SEC, Capital Markets & Compliance, Periodic & Interim Reporting
In 2018 the SEC adopted rule amendments that require operating companies to submit financial statements in a new reporting format - Inline XBRL. The requirements will be phased-in by company size from 2019 to 2021, as follows:
What percent of disclosures in the primary financial statements of SEC registrants are unique to the company? According to a recent SEC staff analysis, the answer is 9% for U.S. GAAP filers and 16% for IFRS filers.
The SEC recently published its draft strategic plan for 2018-2012 (read the PDF here). In the plan, the SEC reiterates its commitment to modernizing SEC filers’ financial data in ways that improve the ability of both Wall Street and Main Street investors to make informed investment decisions.
As investors increasingly make investments informed by extensive data analytics and executed through algorithms on electronic platforms, it’s imperative the SEC keep pace with the evolving capital markets.
The IFRS Taxonomy 2018 is changing. The IFRS Foundation has proposed updates to the taxonomy and has made the changes available to the public for comment.
