XBRL Guidance for Internal Audit Available
New guidance is available for internal auditors on their potential role in helping their organizations transition to filing financial statements in XBRL.
A free whitepaper published by The Institute of Internal Auditors Research Foundation, “XBRL: What’s in it for Internal Auditors,” provides an overview of XBRL and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s filing requirements for public companies, approaches to implementation, and an overview of how internal auditors can be involved in the adoption of the reporting format.
While management has overall responsibility for ensuring the accuracy of financial statements produced in XBRL, internal auditors can help management implement XBRL and provide objective assurance on the XBRL adoption and conversion processes, according to the report.
The research also cites opportunities for internal auditors to use XBRL to add value throughout the compliance and reporting process, including: enabling them to move from statistical testing to testing 100 percent of relevant data and creating conditions for the transition to a continuous auditing model; allowing for a reduction or elimination of manual intervention and greater ability to apply centralized and standardized business rules, reducing the level of overall risk; providing a way to operate on a standardized data model and offering controls and analytics that can be easily and consistently shared and offering a standardized “shareable” internal audit program.








Readers may also be interested in this blog post about the white paper by Gianluca Garbellotto, its principal author (http://tinyurl.com/cstzgn)
Bob Schneider
Editor, Data Interactive (the Hitachi XBRL blog)
http://hitachidatainteractive.com
Comment by Bob Schneider — June 26, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
Thank you, Bob. In addition to XBRL.org, IASB.org/XBRL Hitachi maintains a great resource on XBRL.
Comment by Vladimir — June 30, 2009 @ 1:03 am
Internal auditing of XBRL filings is still an open unexplored field. Auditors are yet to develop the procedures and milestones necessary for authenticating an XBRL filing. To date, liability is limited. That will be changing in the near future. Filers will be liable for the content of their instance documents and extensions. Internal auditing controls need to be ready.
Comment by Peter Boritz — June 30, 2009 @ 2:10 pm