Staff in the Commission’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis has observed that some filers are not appropriately tagging disclosures about their finance lease liability, undiscounted future lease payments, and the excess amount of the undiscounted future lease payments over the finance lease liability (i.e., imputed interest). Filers tagging these disclosures should use the following elements from the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) Financial Reporting Taxonomy, respectively.

• FinanceLeaseLiability
• FinanceLeaseLiabilityPaymentsDue
• FinanceLeaseLiabilityUndiscountedExcessAmount

The most commonly observed tagging errors include the inappropriate use of custom tags to tag the excess amount of the undiscounted future lease payments over the finance lease liability, incorrect use of negative values to tag the excess amount as an offset to the undiscounted future lease payments, and use of incorrect tags related to capital leases under the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 840 – Leases, which has been superseded by ASC 842 – Leases.

While custom tags accommodate unique circumstances in a filer’s particular disclosure, the Commission has acknowledged that the use of custom tags could potentially reduce the ability of users to compare similar information across companies.[1] Thus, the Commission’s rules specify that “[a]n electronic filer must create and use a new special element if and only if an appropriate tag does not exist in the standard list of tags for reasons other than or in addition to an inappropriate standard label."[2]

Regarding negative values, most XBRL numeric elements are designed to be entered as positive values even if, in presentation, they are generally offsets to other values. For example, accumulated depreciation, depletion, and amortization for property plant and equipment should be entered as positive values. For more information on negative values, see sections 6.6.30 and 6.11.6 of the EDGAR Filer Manual (Volume II).

Selecting current and relevant elements from the U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy to tag disclosures facilitates effective access to and analysis of the disclosures by investors, other market participants, and other data users. As part of the selection process, filers should carefully review the accounting standards disclosure requirements and the U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy before mapping their disclosures to the taxonomy elements.

Filers can find additional information about the concepts listed above by consulting the U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting taxonomy. For more data quality reminders, see Staff Observations and Guidance.