Digital Financial Reporting

Per the Data Coalition, the GREAT Act has now passed both houses of congress.

The Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act of 2019 mandates that federal grant reporting be modernized and use structured data.  The Data Coalition provides this one pager that explains the act.

As I explained in this blog post, essentially what this means is that the approximatly 300,000 not-for-profits that recieve federal grants over a certain threashhold which I think is $500,000 which are subject to the OMB A-133 audit or "single audit" requirement will be reporting digitally.  While XBRL is not explicitly named, XBRL could be used or OMG's SBRM might be used.  The technical syntax format really does not matter, what matters is that the reports will be digital and machine-readable.

Further, it appears that the information will be required to be audited.  SEC 5. SINGLE AUDIT ACT seems to say that these reports will be audited.

This modern digital reporting approach will begin in 3 years.  Reported digital information will be made available publically on a government portal that I would imagine would be something similar to the SEC's EDGAR system of XBRL-based reports.

This will be awesome!  I am assuming that the quality issues experienced by the SEC will be addressed and not repeated by this system.