ABSTRACT
The passage of the Data Transparency and Accountability Act in the United States Congress will necessitate that government agencies provide more data in transparent formats. The issue of how to interpret such data remains an open question. The accounting profession has continued to struggle with common formats since the inception of balance sheets and income statements. The original FASB Conceptual Framework was developed to help construct consistent GAAP standards. XBRL was developed to provide a consistent representation of the data contained in financial statements and other financial documents. This research explores the use of two codifications (U.S. GAAP and IFRS) of GAAP standards in both their syntactic representation through XBRL taxonomies and their semantics through their authoritative references back to their own standards and codification. The research uses language theory to model the codifications in terms of the strings used to represent lexical content in the financial statements and to provide a systematic mapping to the semantics of the related XBRL specifications. The immediate objectives of this research are to provide a means to compare the semantic richness of U.S. GAAP and IFRS and to determine the consistency of either standardization with respect to the emerging shared Conceptual Framework. Ultimately, to the extent that the system is able to model both the syntax and the semantics of the financial statements, it could provide a baseline on which to consider assurance over parts of the financial statements, rather than over the financial statements taken as a whole.
