SEC enforces Use of XII Units Registry

DataTracks, a global leader in XBRL services, with seven years’ track record and more than 12,000 XBRL statements per annum in US and UK announced plans to launch a next generation “minds on, hands off” XBRL service to financial printers and corporations in the United States.

This means that, if a filer or their service provider creates an element for which the units have already been defined in the Units Registry, they must use the unit type as defined in the registry. Using unit type that does not match Unit Registry will result in the XBRL submission failure. This applies to all filings that are created using the 2012 US GAAP Taxonomy and of course, will apply to the 2013 as well.

You can refer the latest version of Unit Registry on http://xbrl.org/utr/utr.xml. Element item types such as Area item type, Power item type, Volume item type, Voltage item types, Length item types and currencies are covered under this.

This enforcement from the SEC is a very encouraging as it helps to bring in the uniformity between the Entities in reporting units. For example, if the utility company has reported gallons, they should be tagged to volume Item Type elements and unit Id should be “gal” that is defined under http://www.xbrl.org/2009/utr. Similarly, unit ID for values reported in Chinese currency should be “CNY” and not “RMB” for tagging monetary Item Type elements. Any other unit Id under this context will be rejected by SEC.

“DataTracks’ application helps the users to look up and tag these units easily based on the item type of elements that they use. For example, if the user is tagging area Item Type element, Acre, Square Foot, Square Mile and Square Yard are listed under units registry inside the tagging section. This makes the identification quite easy”, said Suresh Illath, Head of Service Delivery, DataTracks.

DataTracks continuously focuses on providing the most up-to-date services in the XBRL space. DataTracks currently offers XBRL services for US, UK and India markets and plans to extend its services to other countries in the near future. DataTracks has been investing sustained efforts to ensure that its services conform to the latest standards as dictated by regulatory bodies in the regions that it operates.

We have XBRL experts who have experience in working with various regulatory environments (SEC in USA, HMRC in UK, MCA in India, ACRA in Singapore and Revenue in Ireland) various accounting taxonomies and various commercially available XBRL applications.