On July 17, 2017, the US Securities and Exchange Commission upgraded the EDGAR systems with the version update which is referred to as Release 17.2.
The SEC usually accepts the last 2 versions of the XBRL taxonomy, which means XBRL formats prepared on the basis of the last 2 versions of the taxonomy are only accepted by the SEC. With every new version announcement, the older version of the taxonomy is allowed to be used for preparing XBRL documents for a brief period of time and then such older versions of taxonomy are disallowed to be used.
Thus, with the current version upgrade of 17.2, the EDGAR systems will support only two recent versions of the GAAP taxonomy i.e. 2017 US GAAP and 2016 US GAAP taxonomy. Apart from this, the EDGAR systems no longer support some of the supporting taxonomies such as the 2013 COUNTRY taxonomy, 2014 CURRENCY taxonomy, and the 2015 EXCH taxonomy.
What does this mean for Corporate filers?
Since the Q3-September end is not very far off, it is important for you to make sure which version of the taxonomy are you using?
If you are still using the 2015 US GAAP taxonomy, you need to ensure that you are transitioned to the most recent acceptable versions at the earliest. If the taxonomy is in the 2015 US GAAP version, the EDGAR systems are not going to accept such XBRL files.
Not just the transition to the acceptable version is important, but you should also ensure that the company taxonomy has been updated as per the new structuring-modeling of the taxonomy that you are going to use.
In order to avoid any last-minute panic, this is the opportune time to plan right ahead of time and make sure the SEC compliance reporting process for the upcoming Q3 is smooth.
The SEC staff encourages corporate filers to make use of the benefits of the most recent taxonomies EDGAR system now supports 2017 US GAAP, 2017 COUNTRY, 2017 CURRENCY, 2017 EXCH, and 2017 NAICS taxonomies.
To know detailed information on the list of standard approved taxonomies which the SEC supports please click here.
Once SEC approves a new taxonomy, we always make sure our product; IRIS Carbon® supports the new version of the taxonomy at the earliest.
The Customer Success team of IRIS Carbon® encourages companies to be on the latest version of the taxonomy and proactively reaches out to the clients to let them know that there is a new taxonomy version released and suggest they move to the latest taxonomy. As a part of our offering, we do the version transition activity every year so that our clients can spend their time on other important areas which need more focus and attention.
