Organization, Consolidation, Basis of Presentation/Reporting, Nature of Business

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 09:28AM
Charlie in Creating Investor Friendly SEC XBRL Filings

Diving into analyzing more textual information and information included within the policies and disclosures, I looked into how filers were reporting organization information, consolidation information, basis of presentation/reporting, and nature of business.

Of the 5525 filings in the set which I have analyzed, 5296 (96%) used one of the following concepts in their filing to report some permutation/combination of such information:

• us-gaap:OrganizationConsolidationAndPresentationOfFinancialStatementsDisclosureTextBlock 2774 (53%)
• us-gaap:SignificantAccountingPoliciesTextBlock 796 (14%)
• us-gaap:NatureOfOperations   614  (11%)
• us-gaap:OrganizationConsolidationAndPresentationOfFinancialStatementsDisclosure AndSignificantAccountingPoliciesTextBlock  278  (5%)
• us-gaap:OrganizationConsolidationBasisOfPresentationBusinessDescriptionAnd AccountingPoliciesTextBlock   227 (4%)
• us-gaap:BasisOfAccounting 211 (38%)
• us-gaap:BasisOfPresentationAndSignificantAccountingPoliciesTextBlock 199 (4%)
• us-gaap:BusinessDescriptionAndBasisOfPresentationTextBlock 114  (2%)
• us-gaap:BusinessDescriptionAndAccountingPoliciesTextBlock  57 (1%)
• us-gaap:QuarterlyFinancialInformationTextBlock  26  (<1%)

The remaining 229 filings used some other concept, created an extension concept, or did not report organizational information, basis of reporting, or nature of their business. Not unexpectedly, of the 229 filings which did not utilize one of these concepts, every one was a 10-Q.

A fair amount of filers packed the organization information, consolidation policies, basis of presentation/reporting and nature of business information within the concept us-gaap:SignificantAccountingPoliciesTextBlock along with the actual significant policies. 

A fair amount of filers also created an extension concept as the permutation/combination which they apparently felt they were providing did not match the permutations/combinations provided in the US GAAP taxonomy.

Disclosing this type of information raises the question in ones mind as to the benefit of an endless qualtity of different permutations/combinations as contrast to creating totally seperate "boxes" and requiring specific information to be placed within a specific box. Each approach has its pros and cons.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).