The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the 2013 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy, giving companies the green light to rely on it for use in preparing and submitting their financial statements in XBRL.

FASB, which is responsible for maintaining, updating, and improving the taxonomy, first issued the 2013 taxonomy for public comment in August, then in nearly final form pending SEC approval in December. FASB says the release approved by the SEC was modified after it was made available in near finished form in December 2012.

FASB says the minor changes are explained in page 5 of the release notes, and it's important for those companies that may have been working with their own XBRL processes based on the December release to take note of those minor changes and assure their XBRL filings reflect them. “The changes are very minor,” says FASB spokesman Christine Klimek.

The taxonomy is a list of computer-readable tags in XBRL that allows companies to tag each piece of financial data in their financial statements and footnote disclosures. The SEC's approval is required before companies can rely on it to submit their financial statements in XBRL. The SEC has said it plans to begin removing old GAAP Taxonomies from its library of GAAP resources, so companies that have been slow to adopt newer taxonomies need to do so to assure they are keeping up to date with changes.

When FASB introduced the proposed 2013 taxonomy in draft form last August, the staff said changes from the 2012 taxonomy focus on the removal of references that have been superseded by the Accounting Standards Codification and the removal of non-GAAP references that are no longer maintained. It also includes a remodeling of the segment disclosure area and areas specific to the insurance profession, plus a remodeling of disclosures for unrecognized deferred taxes. The new taxonomy also features a remodeling of the disclosures of other operating income and expense to eliminate redundancies, FASB says.

FASB also recently floated some ideas on a proposed structural change to the taxonomy, focusing on possible changes to the calculation hierarchy. The “invitation to comment” spells out some ideas for a new calculation hierarchy that are meant to make the taxonomy more useful to preparers and users of financial statements.

The taxonomy contains calculation hierarchies that demonstrate mathematical relationship between the various elements of the taxonomy, indicating which elements are totals and which are the sum of various elements. The current taxonomy provides a summation for every statement or disclosure presentation, regardless of overlap. FASB is wondering whether the hierarchy should instead eliminate inconsistencies created by multiple calculation hierarchies. The revised hierarchy would reduce the number of summations to only three.

FASB is accepting comments on the invitation to comment through July 14.