XBRL 2.0

Digital financial reporting that actually works

THE XBRL FILES: CLEANING UP AFTER DOW CHEMICAL

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.



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