Assurance on XBRL instance document: A conceptual framework of assertions

XBRL stands for extensible business reporting language. It is an XML based computer language for reporting business information. In December 2008, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC) voted to require public filers to provide a supplemental exhibit of their financial statements (including footnotes) in XBRL, with the approximately top 500 public companies required to comply with this new requirement starting June 15, 2009, and the phase-in of this requirement for the other filers to be completed on June 15, 2011. The file created using the XRBL language is called an XBRL instance document. Under this requirement, the filers are not required to obtain a third party assurance on the XBRL instance document. The main reason for not requiring a third party independent assurance of XBRL instance documents is to encourage filers to comply with the SEC requirement without incurring much added costs. In addition, to encourage the filers to comply with this requirement, the SEC is not holding filers legally liable of any errors in the filed XBRL instance documents so long as they look similar to the standard reports when viewed using the SEC viewer.Even though the SEC is not currently requiring a third party assurance of the XBRL instance documents of the SEC filings, it is in the best interest of the public that these documents be assured. Although there have been efforts by both the practitioners and academics to investigate issues involved in providing assurance on XBRL documents, these efforts have been focused on the specifics of the assurance process and the difficulties involved in it, and not on developing a framework of assertions. Even the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants recent publication SOP 09-1 provides only an illustrative list of management assertions for handling the XBRL-tagging engagements under the SSAEs as agreed-upon procedures without considering a framework. Without a conceptual framework, the assurance process for XBRL instance document would be ad hoc and inconsistent. This paper develops a set of assertions for providing assurance on XBRL instance documents similar to the management assertions for financial audits. Further, we discuss how such a framework would assist auditors in planning and evaluating such an engagement by collecting appropriate items of evidence pertaining to specific assertions to form an opinion whether the instance document is a true representation of the standard format (i.e., ASCII or HTML) document. We also discuss how the use of new technology would make the assurance process more effective and efficient.