Digital Financial Reporting

The following is a summary of the quality measurements of XBRL-based financial reports submitted to the SEC as of March 31, 2018.  The following Excel spreadsheets and other documents provide details related to these quality measurements:

• Narrative which further explains these measurements
• ZIP file containing Excel spreadsheet with details of errors
• ZIP file containing Excel spreadsheets which has pretty good (i.e. not commercial quality, but close) working validator and validation of 3,945 XBRL-based financial filings, about 67% of all such reports
• 10-K metadata for 6,005 public companies (easy to work with XML infosets; fairly large, takes about 10 minutes to download)
• Extraction tool

In summary, fundamental accounting concept relations quality has steadily improved each year as can be seen by the three year comparison.  On an individual test basis, each of the 22 relations tests is 98% consistent with what is expected.  88.5% of all XBRL-based financial reports are consistent with all 22 relations tests as would be expected.  The goal as I see it is that all XBRL-based financial filings are 99.99966% consistent with expectations (six sigma).

I have added measurements of what I call the disclosure mechanics of 65 disclosures.  Disclosure mechanics quality has increased from 88% to 90% for the 65 disclosures I am measuring.  Again, the goal is six sigma for every disclosure reported.

The following are graphical summaries:

Fundamental accounting concept relations for last 10-K or 10-Q filed by generator of the report:

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Fundamental accounting concept relations by relation test (same filings as above):

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Comparison of 2016, 2017, and 2018 fundamental accounting relations results: 

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Disclosure mechanics by generator results from analysis of last 10-K filed with SEC as of March 31, 2018:

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Disclosure mechanics results by disclosure:

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I will likely put together a narrative that explains these measurements in more detail.