Comparison of Published vs XBRL Financial Statements in U.S.: Impact of the Use of Non-Standard Company-specific Tags in XBRL Filings

• In Event: Emerging Research and Research Interaction 2

Abstract

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandated the filing of XBRL reports by all public companies in U.S. starting in 2011. The supposed advantages of XBRL reports include compliance with reporting regulations, simplification and streamlining of financial reporting, increased transparency, and improved data quality. The SEC does allow companies to tag company-specific elements with non-standard tags for items that may not lend themselves to standard tagging. This use of non-standard tags increases the possibility that XBRL information may not be easily extractable for comparative analyses. The purpose of this study is to examine the use of standard and non-standard tags in public companies XBRL reports for 2013 to verify the extent of utilization of non-standard tags and how these tags affect comparability. Secondly, there are recent reports on certain companies making changes to their published information after filing with the SEC. It is unclear whether these companies also altered their XBRL filings at the same. If they did not change the XBRL filings, this could imply one of two things: either the original XBRL filing was accurate, while the published financial statements were erroneous or they were both inaccurate and only one was corrected. The results of our study will be useful for policy makers to determine if any limits are necessary for how companies use non-standard tags and to insist on correspondence between published and XBRL financial statements.

Authors

• Shifei Chung, Rowan University

• Ramesh Narasimhan, Montclair State University