Corporate Actions Should be Reported in XBRL

It’s time to report Corporate Actions in a standardized electronic format such as XBRL

Corporate actions includes events like dividends, stock splits, mergers, rights, options etc. Such actions are announced by companies through news releases, prospectuses, regulatory filings and more frequently lately, social media, particularly Twitter.

They are extremely time sensitive, because all investors must have access to the information at the same time. Even seemingly innocuous differences can lead to significant unfair trading advantages. Also, the traditional means of communication means that the information must be copied from one document to another, which increase the likelihood of errors being made.

The DTCC, SWIFT and XBRL US released a business case several years ago for the use of XBRL in such filings. This could reduce the timing issue significantly as well as the risk of error.

Since then an international Working Group of XBRL International has been working on this at the international level.

There has been some interest in Canada in this approach and XBRL Canada has been pursuing it. For more information see www.xbrl.ca and www.xbrl.us .