Duplicate Facts

What are duplicate facts?

In many reporting scenarios, it is common for the same piece of information to be presented multiple times in a human-readable presentation of the report. For example, the figure for revenue may appear on the main financial statements as well as in a note giving a detailed breakdown.

It is generally considered best practice to tagA tag renders a value in XBRL, made up of an element, a calendar, numeric units and a member, if needed. all figures in an Inline XBRLExtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an XML-based standard for defining and exchanging business and financial performance information. document, as this makes it easier to spot untagged figures, and it makes it possible for consumers to navigate effectively between XBRL facts and the locations in which they were reported in the presentation.

There are 4 classes of duplicate facts:

Complete
Consistent
Multi-language
Inconsistent

Complete Duplicates

Have equal values
In the case of numeric facts, have the same (inferred) value for decimals
In case of string facts, have the same effective @xml:lang value

Consistent Duplicates

Are numeric facts; and
Have equal values after rounding to the highest (i.e. least precise) of the (inferred) values of decimals for each fact

It should be noted that numeric facts that are complete duplicates are also considered to be consistent duplicates.

The value for Sales of shares of common stock, net of offering costs is reported as $200,909 (in dollars) on the statement of Cash Flow.

The same value is reported in a different scale in the associated note disclosure as 0.2 million dollars.

	The fact on Statement of Cash Flows	The fact on Disclosure
Fact value	200,909	0.2
Unit	USD	USD
Scaling	In dollars (Scale=0)	In million dollars (scale = 6)
Decimal	0	-5 (hundred thousands)
Time Period	6 months ending 6/30/2018	6 months ending 6/30/2018

SEC permits the duplicates from this consistent duplicate scenario, and DM produces the proper inline XBRL document which might contain the consistent duplicates.

Multi-language duplicates

Facts that fulfill the XBRL v2.1 definition of duplicate items, but which are based on certain string item types, and which are differentiated by having unique effective values of the @xml:lang attribute. The string item types included in this definition are stringItemType, normalizedStringItemType, and types derived from them. It should be noted that the effective language for a particular elementThe representation of a financial reporting concept, including: line items in the face of the financial statements, important narrative disclosures, and rows and columns in tables. may be inherited from an @xml:lang attribute appearing on an ancestor element.

Such duplicates may provide multi-language translations of a fact, but there is no automated way to determine if the statements being made in different languages are equivalent. As such, it is not possible to identify them as being either consistent or inconsistent.

Inconsistent Duplicates

Facts that fulfill the XBRL v2.1 definition of duplicates items, but which are neither complete duplicates nor consistent duplicates. Inconsistent duplicates will produce a validation error which will prevent the values from being reported in the XBRL and Inline XBRL document. These instances should be resolved prior to filing with the SEC.

For more information on duplicate facts, see Handling Duplicate Facts in XBRL and Inline XBRL 1.0 and EDGARElectronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR), is a SEC system used by public companies to transmit filings of annual and quarterly reports and other disclosures. Filer Manual rule 6.5.12.