Review of Tagging - Completeness and Accuracy

Completeness checks

Mandatory tags

There is usually a set of mandatory tags that must be present before the XBRL submission will be accepted by your regulator.  To check if the document contains all mandatory tags, run the validation process in the Validation Panel, described in the article titled "Review of Tagging - Validations"

Non-mandatory tags

It is usually not enough to tag using only the mandatory tags.  You should tag all facts in the document if a tag exists for the fact.  

Facts in the document that are tagged are clearly visible by the coloured Document Anchors.  To review the completeness of the tagging you should either cycle through each segment and investigate any untagged facts or print off the review report which will show the entire document in one report.

It is usual however to have untagged facts in the document because it is unlikely that the taxonomy will have tags for every fact you are reporting.

Review of Accuracy - Review Report

The review report is designed to:

• Provide a document which contains all the necessary information to review that a document has been completely and accurately tagged; and
• Highlight risk areas (such as adaptor errors or negative interpreted values) to enhance the quality and efficiency of the review
• Provide a mechanism (via the pdf export) to allow a third party, such as an auditor, to review the tagged document without having access to Report Authority.

To run the review report, select the “Review Report” button in the “Review” section of the XBRL ribbon to access the review report.

• The review report will:
  Provide a summary of the number of tags found in the document and the taxonomy used - Was the correct taxonomy used? 
• Provide an overview of the entity and period definitions - have they been defined correctly?
• Provide an overview of the specific currency units used - are there any unexpected currencies?
• Provide an overview of the number of times a particular scale was used - are there any unexpected or missing numeric scales used?
• Provide the results of the validations. Are there any unresolved validation issues?

Negative value tags

This is a key section of the review report.  Using the wrong sign is the most common error when XBRL tagging.  

As mentioned in previous articles, the general rule is that the sign of a fact in XBRL should be positive, regardless of the balance being a DR or CR.  Negative values are only expected if the fact is expected to have both positive and negative values, such as Net Interest Income / (Expense), or Gross Profit / (Loss) etc.

This section should contain only facts that are expected to have both positive and negative numbers.  if it contains any inherently negative facts such as expenses, liabilities or deductions, it is probably that the tag's signage convention was not reversed.

Marked-up report

The review report also contains a marked-up version of the entire report indicating which facts have been tagged with a tag number that corresponds to the number used in the table following the report.

Table of tags used

After the marked-up report is a table illustrating which tags were used and how the fact will be interpreted in the XBRL.  It contains columns for:

• The primary tags used.
• The secondary tags used.
• The period context.
• The interpreted value (taking into account the scaling, unit and reverse signage convention values).