Charles Hoffman, often credited with founding XBRL, has been studying more than 5,500 XBRL filings to the Securities and Exchange mission to get a sense of the semantic model of financial reports that is emerging through the XBRL process. He’s curious to see how well SEC filings adhere to that model.

He analyzed both 10-Ks and 10-Qs looking for some patterns of nsistency in how mpanies are selecting tags to relate mmon financial reporting ncepts. Hoffman found that 21 different generators were responsible for creating his sample of 5,525 filings, which logically suggests there might be more diversity in implementation than if the entire sample were generated by a single source or only a few sources.

The analysis focused on some fundamental elements that should be mmon among virtually all financial reports for public mpanies: assets, liabilities, equity, profit, loss, cash, revenue, basic entity information and the like. Despite the large number of sources, 3,170 of the filings, or 57 percent, had a mbination of all the key characteristics where Hoffman was hoping to see some patterns.

It’s an impressive indicator of the quality of the XBRL submissions given how new the technology is, in Hoffman’s view. “There is definitely a leveragable semantic model peering out from that set of 5,525 SEC financial filings,” he wrote.

Hoffman found every sample reported the ncept for the entity’s name, but only 21 percent reported the ncept for their trading symbol. He surmises registrants must not find the trading symbol ncept to be useful. While every sample reported the document period end date, Hoffman found on closer examination that about 20 filings reported it as the submission date or some other date rather than the balance sheet date.

While 97 percent of all filings reported a ncept for assets and for liabilities and equity, he found five filings where they didn’t balance, either in the HTML or the XBRL filings. Hoffman found that 96 percent of filings reported one of four ncepts for equity – stockholders equity, stockholders equity including the portion attributable to nonntrolling interest, partners’ capital, and partners’ capital including the portion attributable to nonntrolling interest – and he sensed some innsistency in the use of the equity ncepts.

Hoffman was disturbed to note that inme/loss is being reported under three different ncepts. There are separate ncepts in the taxonomy for profit/loss, inme/loss, and inme/loss available to mmon stockholders. “Basically, there is ambiguity as to which of the three of those ncepts to use in different reporting scenarios,” he wrote.

Hoffman says his next move will be to drill another level lower into the cash flow statement, which he expects to be easy. Then he will take on the inme statement, which he expects to be more difficult because there is more variety in how mpanies report inme, so it will be more difficult to detect patterns. “A bottom-up approach may be superior to a -down approach,” he wrote.