New guidance is available for internal auditors on their potential role in helping their anizations transition to filing financial statements in XBRL.

A free whitepaper published by The Institute of Internal Auditors Research Foundation, “XBRL: What’s in it for Internal Auditors,” provides an overview of XBRL and the Securities and Exchange mission’s filing requirements for public mpanies, approaches to implementation, and an overview of how internal auditors can be involved in the adoption of the reporting format.

While management has overall responsibility for ensuring the auracy of financial statements produced in XBRL, internal auditors can help management implement XBRL and provide objective assurance on the XBRL adoption and nversion processes, acrding to the report.

The research also cites opportunities for internal auditors to use XBRL to add value throughout the mpliance and reporting process, including: enabling them to move from statistical testing to testing 100 percent of relevant data and creating nditions for the transition to a ntinuous auditing model; allowing for a rction or elimination of manual intervention and greater ability to apply centralized and standardized business rules, rcing the level of overall risk; providing a way to operate on a standardized data model and offering ntrols and analytics that can be easily and nsistently shared and offering a standardized “shareable” internal audit program.