One of the common questions we receive regarding XBRL tagging is, “Why did the tagging of the document change this period when compared to a previous filing?” This is a great question, with two short answers.

The first reason is that RDG Filings is consistently working to improve the quality of XBRL tagging on a quarterly basis to be consistent with the latest US-GAAP taxonomy and to remain in line with evolving industry standards.

The second is that the US-GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy is updated on an annual basis by FASB. This may or may not result in tagging changes in your document depending on which areas of the taxonomy are adjusted. These changes usually result in updates to best practices, style-guides , and Accounting Standards adjustments by FASB, AICPA and XBRL-US.

Typically, the taxonomy changes are released by FASB in the fourth quarter of the calendar year, but are not supported by the SEC’s EDGAR System until after the first calendar quarter of the next year, so most updates to tagging happen between the end of the first calendar quarter and the filing of any XBRL documents filed after that point.

Our role at RDG is to make sure all of our clients documents are in line with the most recent EDGAR and XBRL guidelines as well as best practices.  When tagging changes are necessary, we will point out what changes were made using our interactive ThunderDome XBRL Viewer.

We are proud of the fact that our XBRL data quality is at the top (99^th percentile) of our industry quarter after quarter. There are only a few filing agents that can claim such consistency. The effort of improving XBRL data quality is why RDG Filings was one of the founding members of the XBRL.us Center for Data Quality and why quality and version control of your documents is our main objective.