Development of a Prototype Public File Repository for XBRL Documents: Challenges and Opportunities

Within the past few years, companies have begun publishing financial reports in an XML-based open-standard file format called XBRL. Providing easy public access to XBRL formatted data of company disclosures would provide investors, analysts, and accounting researchers the data in a highly flexible and usable format. EDGAR currently provides public access to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission s required filings for publicly traded companies. Currently, EDGAR filings must be in either ASCII, HTML, and in some select cases, XML format. Though EDGAR has recently started to provide XBRL formatted data to the public for a limited number of companies, their primary distribution method remains in traditional file formats including plain text files, PDF, and GIF. Regardless of difficulties with XBRL specification versioning and customized taxonomies, XBRL data aggregators have yet to address any simple mechanism to retrieve XBRL documents. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a prototype public file repository for XBRL documents and present challenges and opportunities of having this public file repository. Also, in response to an anticipated demand for XBRL documents for the purpose of more frequent reporting and auditing of financial information, we compare two approaches of public access to XBRL documents on the web: file repository and file registry.