Case Study: USAFacts achieves a machine-readable, iXBRL-tagged comprehensive U.S. government 10-K with Donnelley Financial Solutions

Comprehensive US Government 10-K is Published with iXBRL for the First Time

USAFacts, the nonpartisan nonprofit that compiles comprehensive U.S. government financial data, faced a major challenge: government reporting was inconsistent, often trapped in PDFs, and not machine-readable, which limited timely analysis of pandemic-era spending and other public finances. To address this, USAFacts partnered with Donnelley Financial Solutions and used DFIN’s ActiveDisclosure to convert its 2019 10‑K into iXBRL.

Donnelley Financial Solutions built an iXBRL template and tagged the 200+ page 2019 10‑K (financials and notes) using US GAAP and CAFR taxonomy elements, delivering the first full‑length government 10‑K published in iXBRL (released April 15, 2020). The work made USAFacts’ data both human- and machine-readable, improved transparency and comparability, reduced future tagging effort through reusable templates, and helps pave the way to eliminate multi-year reporting lags for government financials.

USAFacts

Poppy MacDonald

President