Reducing the Regulatory Reporting Burden
March 16, 2017
Remarks of Richard Berner, Director, Office of Financial Research, at the Financial Data Summit hosted by the Data Transparency Coalition: Reducing the Regulatory Reporting Burden, March 16, 2017, Washington, D.C.
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Today, I am going to turn my focus to another aspect of our work on financial data: reducing the regulatory reporting burden.
At first glance, improving financial data might seem to conflict with reducing that burden. The truth is that the two actually complement each other.
In my remarks today, I will explain how. I’ll note some of the many paths to achieving those complementary goals, including the use of data standards, best practices in data collection, and more extensive data sharing.
At the OFR, we have launched an initiative to reduce the regulatory reporting burden. I will discuss why that initiative is important, and describe how it aligns with efforts to improve data scope, data quality, and data accessibility — what I call the three-legged stool of our data work.
Reducing the regulatory reporting burden is actually a topic familiar to many here at the Data Transparency Coalition. Just this week, the Data Foundation — a sister organization — and the accounting firm PwC published a research paper demonstrating that government can reduce the cost and improve the quality of data significantly by adopting common data standards. A program in Australia to push common data standards, a concept known as Standard Business Reporting, reportedly saved the Australian government and companies more than a billion Australian dollars last year. The report also noted that the use of open data significantly improves data quality.
The full speech is available here.