On March 7, 2015 – We posted that in early May the US Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would announce a government-wide common data standard for all federal spending information as mandated in the DATA Act unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by the President of the United States in April 2014. The law requires that federal spending information be tagged using a common data standard (linked to government accounting definitions) and this information would be placed on an Open Data Cloud platform for public consumption and analysis since the information would be in a computer-readable format
The law also incorporated the OPEN Government Data Act, which requires all non-sensitive government data to be made available in machine-readable formats which includes financial data using global standards like XBRL.
As regulators, investors, companies, government and analysts increasingly use XBRL data for their analyses the market need for digital assurance of the specific reported data elements using XBRL will increase – especially as data is separated from original disclosure documents and mashed into new reports and data analytic surveys. Major search engines like GOOGLE are using structured data (XBRL is a version of structured data created by the accounting and auditing for business and financial data reported on the Internet) to better locate and process information: “Structured data use is increasing and is in approximately one-third of the commonly crawled web now and clicks increased by 43 percent using the structured data format
The Finance team is quickly becoming the “de facto” manager of nonfinancial data analytics critical to the operation of the companies they serve – Modified Chief Data Officer… As CFO Magazine describes: “About three-quarters (76%) of finance teams currently track some nonfinancial metrics, according to a November 2016 survey of about 300 global CFOs by Adaptive Insights. Nearly half (45%) of the respondents say they now act as their companies’ de facto chief data officer—reporting on a range of KPIs, including nonfinancial metrics
This also includes human capital data disclosure by companies including gender pay and pay ratio data including composition of boards of directors.
What are some of the tech skills accountants of the future will need? Data creation, data governance, data analytics and Big Data according to the Accounting Today article.
The Treasury Department would also adopt data standards that reach across agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission would replace its current financial statement reporting format with a single XBRL filing.” This same XBRL data format is being deployed across the federal government for contract and grant making under the DATA ACT approved unanimously by the US Congress in 2016