With another round of 10-Ks and 10-Qs mostly filed through the early part of 2015, experts are assessing the quality of XBRL filings and seeing not much improvement.
Scale errors continue to be the most common problem found in XBRL filings, says Alex Rapp, co-founder of Calcbench, an interactive data platform that leverages XBRL-formatted financial statement data. A scale error occurs when a company means to report a number as 325 million, for example, but instead records it missing a trio of zeros, so it appears as 325,000. “Unfortunately, many filers don’t appear to realize this is an issue, and therefore are not checking for it,” wrote Rapp in a recent informal assessment of XBRL errors. “This should not be taken lightly.”
