SEC Warns “Be Mindful About Your EPS XBRL Tagging”

Recently, the SEC’s Office of Structured Disclosure warned in this statement that some companies are incorrectly tagging basic and diluted earnings-per-share data in XBRL. Without fixing the tags, apparently the data is useless to end users. Making the fix is important.

The statement explains what is required to tag this information correctly. It’s a little hard to understand unless you are familiar with tagging practices, trust me. The upshot is that the SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis is monitoring this stuff – and as the statement notes, the Staff has found the following incorrect tagging practices in a number of Forms 10-Q and 10-K:

• Creating custom tags (such as BasicAndDilutedEarningsPerShare) to tag the amount when basic and diluted EPS have the same value and are presented only once on the face of the income statement.
• Tagging this amount only once using one of the two standard tags.
• Tagging this amount using a standard tag that was deprecated in 2022.