The XBRL US Data Quality Committee (DQC) has published its 9th Ruleset for a 45-day public review and comment period, which closes on June 15, 2019. In addition to expanding on many existing rules, the latest ruleset contains a new category of checks that evaluates and identifies incorrect calculation relationships in the SEC filers company taxonomy. The rule works by looking at the calculation relationships defined in the filers extension taxonomy and compares that to the U.S. GAAP taxonomies to identify contradictions.

“We’ve seen situations where a company’s extension taxonomy has incorrectly defined Noncurrent Assets as being a child of Current Assets. Or where Property Plant & Equipment is defined as a sibling (rather than a child) to Noncurrent Assets. These are obvious errors that impact analysis of the data but sometimes are difficult to catch when manually reviewing an XBRL file. This new set of rules will help companies catch and correct mistakes like these before inaccuracies in their financials are delivered to regulators, investors and analysts,” said Campbell Pryde, CEO of XBRL US.

The Committee also announced that the effective date for the 8th Ruleset, when SEC filers are expected to begin complying with the rules, is May 8, 2019. The 8th Ruleset, which was approved by the Committee at its meeting in February 2019, contains many checks specifically for IFRS filers. The proposed 9th Ruleset expands on the IFRS negative value rules by adding over 600 additional concepts that should not be reported as negative.

The DQC, which is funded through the XBRL US Center for Data Quality, is responsible for developing guidance and validation rules that can prevent or detect inconsistencies or errors in XBRL data filed with the SEC, and focuses on data quality issues that adversely affect data analysis. All approved rules and guidance are free and publicly available. A webinar will be held on May 15 to review both rulesets. Register: https://xbrl.us/events/201905015/

Filers have immediate access to all final approved rules as well as the 9th Ruleset in public review so that they can check their filings prior to SEC submission. There are several options available to filers:

• Through software that has been certified to run with the ruleset: https://xbrl.us/certification
• Through the XBRL US checking tool: https://xbrl.us/check
• By downloading the Approved Rules and using them with Arelle – the open source version of the SEC’s EDGAR Renderer/Previewer: https://xbrl.us/dqc-releases

To access the approved rules and guidance, go to: https://xbrl.us/rules-guidance

Members of the XBRL US Center for Data Quality include Altova, the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), Broadridge Financial Solutions, Certent, DataTracks, Donnelley Financial Solutions (DFIN),  P3 Data Systems, RDG Filings, and Toppan Merrill. Toppan Merrill is a founding member of the Center for Data Quality.