SEC XBRL Voluntary Filing Program
In February 2005, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released its final ruling (Release No.: 33-8529, File No.: S7-34-04) to establish a voluntary filing program related to XBRL formatted documents. The program allows all participants to furnish supplemental tagged financial information using the XBRL format as exhibits to specific EDGAR filings under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Investment Company Act of 1940.
These XBRL formatted documents will be attached to the EDGAR submissions as Exhibit 100 as listed below:
Document
Type |
Description |
Filename
Extension |
| EX-100.INS |
XBRL Instance document (Required) |
*.xml |
| EX-100.SCH |
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Schema document |
*.xsd |
| EX-100.CAL |
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Calculation Linkbase document |
*.xml |
| EX-100.DEF |
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Definition Linkbase document |
*.xml |
| EX-100.LAB |
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Labels Linkbase document |
*.xml |
| EX-100.PRE |
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Presentation Linkbase document |
*.xml |
| EX-100.REF |
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Reference Linkbase document |
*.xml |
The SEC’s EDGAR system will be equipped with an XBRL validating tool which will be used to confirm that each XBRL formatted document attached to specific filings is compliant with XBRL 2.1 standards. At this point, the SEC states that they will render a pass/fail message regarding applicable submissions and if it is not compliant with XBRL 2.1 standards the instance documents will be stripped from the filing when it is transmitted via EDGAR.
In order to properly create an EDGAR submission with an XBRL formatted exhibit, the submission must contain:
- one or more instance documents containing actual tagged data,
- a standard base taxonomy, and
- any applicable company custom extension taxonomies.
A taxonomy can be defined as the classification system which houses the identifier tags used in building an XBRL formatted document. These standard base taxonomies mentioned above (version 2.1 based taxonomies) were developed by the XBRL consortium (www.xbrl.org), and are based on standard US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
According to Section 5.2.2 of Volume II of the EDGAR Filers Manual, the following taxonomies are available for use in the voluntary program:
- Commercial and Industrial Companies (us-gaap-ci)
- Banking and Savings Institutions (us-gaap-basi)
- Insurance Entities (us-gaap-ins)
- Investment Management (us-gaap-im)
Participants in the program also have the option to use add-on US Financial Reporting Taxonomy Framework taxonomies which include:
- Global Common Document (int-gcd)
- SEC Certification (usfr-sec-cert)
- Management Report (usfr-mr)· Accountants Report (usfr-ar)
- Management Discussion and Analysis (usfr-mda)
Furthermore, participants may need to use company-specific extensions in their EDGAR submissions in order to capture defined tags that are not included in standard taxonomies but are needed to identify data pertinent to the firm’s specific reporting needs.
The voluntary filing program, at this point, will not include a mechanism to render any XBRL related reports on the SEC website. However, the program will be used as an evaluative tool by the SEC to determine the usefulness of data-tagging to registrants, investors, and the SEC. The SEC will continue to test their EDGAR system as they research rendering and other capabilities to provide the XBRL data in a human readable format for end-users.