It’s surprising that some of the
largest US corporations are creating incomplete and error-ridden taxonomies for
use in reporting financial results under XBRL. Case in point: Dow Chemical’s 10Q filed
11/2/18, using Workiva compliance software. The filing had a dismal XBRLogic
Quality Score of 75.8. While Dow is ultimately responsible for the quality of
its filing, Workiva shares the blame for errors and omissions that can clearly
be prevented with sufficiently robust validation software.
The company’s extension taxonomy is
the reporting model into which values are reported every quarter. It should be consistent
with the standardized US-GAAP taxonomy. If it’s not, then it undermines one of
the principle reasons for reporting under XBRL, comparability. Of the 5
categories of issues shown below, not all technically violate SEC filing rules,
but all violate the underlying purpose of XBRL reporting by creating obstacles for
investors in using this data.
For XBRLogic to fully standardize the
primary statements in this report, these are the actual 24 tasks that were
performed. The tasks are automated, but developing that automation took over two
man-years. Few investors will duplicate that effort. So, this filing, while
perhaps useful for cursory analysis, is not suitable for in-depth modeling and
analytics required by sophisticated investors unless modified.
Here are the statements, post-standardization.
