DQC Continues Quest to Improve Data Quality: New Validation Rules Open for Comment

The XBRL US Data Quality Committee (DQC), of which CFA Institute is a member, has opened for public review and comment its second set of proposed guidance and validation rules. The public review contains guidance on tagging, five new proposed rules, and proposed additions to a previously issued rule on detecting inappropriate negative values. To participate in the public review, go to http://publicreview.xbrl.us. We encourage such participation given the success of the first set of rules. The deadline for commenting is 31 August.

The DQC is responsible for developing guidance and validation rules that can prevent or detect inconsistencies or errors in extensible business reporting language — XBRL — data filed with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). It focuses on data quality issues that adversely affect data analysis. The DQC’s analysis shows that if the second set of proposed rules had been in use over the last year, they would have identified potential errors in more than 800,000 data points submitted to the SEC.

The DQC has also conducted an analysis to measure the effectiveness of its first set of validation rules, which enabled the validation of more than 1.9 million data points in the first quarter of 2016. Errors for all SEC filers were reduced by 64% for the data covered by the rules, as shown in the following chart.

Rule Results per Quarter, All Rules and All Filers

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