Updated Financial Report Sematics and Dynamics Theory

Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 08:45AM
Charlie in Creating Investor Friendly SEC XBRL Filings, Digital Financial Reporting

Raynier van Egmond and I have updated the Financial Report Semantics and Dynamics Theory and a new version is available. Most of the changes were correcting typos and other minor adjustments.  This is a summary of the more significant changes:

• A different document style was used.
• The notion of a "property" was added.  Components, facts, characteristics, parenthetical explanations, and relations each have properties.
• Work relating to verification of a financial report is being incorporated; the biggest addition here are the definitions of terms which constitute a "true and fair" financial report: completeness, correctness, consistency, accuracy, fidelity, and integrity.  (See section 4.1)
• A "Future Work" section was added, making it more explicit that there are additional semantics which would build on the eight tests we ran against SEC XBRL financial filings.

No one really came up with anything credible which refutes this theory. One person called the theory a slogan but gave no credible justification for that view.

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