Information that might be of interest for those public companies preparing to comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission's XRBL mandate for the first time: A new white paper detailing some of the most common errors companies make related to XBRL U.S. GAAP Taxonomy rules.

Since the SEC's mandate for companies to submit financial data tagged in XBRL became effective in June of 2009, public companies have submitted more than 1,400 financial filings containing more than 5,000 problems related to the use of the U.S. GAAP Taxonomy, according to the white paper, "Avoiding Common Errors in XBRL Creation," published by XBRL U.S.

Some 500 of the largest U.S. companies have already had to comply with the rule, which requires companies to tag their periodic reports, and in certain cases, Form 8-Ks and 6-Ks and registration statements, in XBRL. Another 1,200 or so are scheduled to begin submitting XBRL-tagged data with their periodic statements filed on or after June 15, and the remainder of SEC registrants will comply with the rule next year. During their first year under the rule, companies only have to tag primary line items and block tag footnotes and schedules. In their second year, they have to detail tag financial data in their footnotes and schedules.

Common errors that can result in incorrect data and/or a lack of comparability between companies include using signs on values incorrectly, i.e. reporting a negative value instead of a positive, or vice versa—which the report says is the most common problem, comprising 64 percent of all errors, and reporting one fact without reporting another fact that's required when the first one was reported, (17 percent of the errors identified), according to the white paper.

Other errors include reporting the wrong value, reporting a value when the value should be zero or not disclosed, and using a concept that's been removed from the taxonomy. The SEC staff also shared some of its own observations on the XBRL submissions it received during a recent public education seminar.

The publication of the white paper coincides with the launch of the XBRL Consistency Suite, a set of online XBRL tools developed by XBRL U.S. Labs, the research and development arm of XBRL U.S., to help companies identify inconsistencies in their XBRL documents related to the use of the U.S. GAAP Taxonomy. The tool performs more than 6,000 tests against a company's XBRL document and produces a report of U.S. GAAP taxonomy-specific errors made. It also includes access to a database of XBRL documents submitted to the SEC, allowing subscribers to perform analytics to see what concepts are being used by their peers and what extensions are being created. According to the Website, an annual subscription to the XBRL Consistency Suite costs $4,000 per CIK. Consistency checks can also be integrated with third-party XBRL software and services.