Digital Financial Reporting

Of the 1262 SEC XBRL financial filings in my set of 7160 SEC filings who report equity attributable to noncontrolling interest on their balance sheet, 1226 (or 97%) use the following US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy concepts to report:

• Equity attributle to parent: us-gaap:StockholdersEquity
• Equity attributle to noncontrolling interest: us-gaap:MinorityInterest
• Total equity: us-gaap:StockholdersEquityIncludingPortionAttributableToNoncontrollingInterest

That is like this SEC filer does and as can be seen in the screen shots below:

Equity attributable to parent:

Total equity:

On the other hand, 36 (or 3%) SEC XBRL financial filings do exactly the opposite and use the following concepts:

• Equity attributle to parent: us-gaap:StockholdersEquityIncludingPortionAttributable ToNoncontrollingInterest
• Equity attributle to noncontrolling interest: us-gaap:MinorityInterest
• Total equity: us-gaap:StockholdersEquity

Here is an example of using that approach which can be seen in the screen shots below:

Equity attributable to parent:

Total equity:

Now, it does not make sense to me to have both approaches deemed correct. So which approach is correct?  The approach used by the majority? Well, if one reads the 2013 US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy labels and definitions it is pretty clear that the first example shown, the majority, has this correct.