Guaranteeing trust with XBRL digital signatures
As business reporting becomes fully digital, trust can no longer be implied. It has to be proven. This week Tom Wacha of Workiva, and a member of the XBRL Best Practices Board, shared his thoughts on how XBRL digital signatures can strengthen confidence in regulatory filings. The article addresses a growing concern in our AI-dominated world: how to guarantee that a report has not been altered between preparation and submission. You’ve seen those videos where someone has faked a receipt for a business expense with ChatGPT? Imagine what happens when a fraudster fakes an entire business report!
PDF and structured data (XBRL) reports can, in theory, be modified in seconds, often without leaving visible traces. The Digital Signatures in XBRL specification, known as D6 and developed by XBRL International, provides a practical answer. It allows one or more legally recognised digital signatures to be applied to an XBRL report, protecting both the human-readable document and the machine-readable data.
The specification supports multiple and partial signatures, enabling precise accountability. Executives, auditors and sustainability officers can each sign the sections they are responsible for, while regulators and investors gain cryptographic assurance that the data they receive is authentic and unchanged.
Digital signatures move XBRL reporting from assumed trust to considerable trust. As AI-driven fraud becomes more accessible, this capability is no longer a technical nice-to-have. We think it will become a critical foundation for secure, scalable and trustworthy reporting.
Read Tom’s guest blog here.
