The European Securities and Markets Authority has issued another update of its question-and-answer information document about the implementation of the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation.

This update relates to the second level of the EMIR validation specifications to be commonly applied by the Trade Repositories or TRs to ensure that reporting is 'EMIR-compliant.'

The validation specifications instruct firms to verify that the values they report in the fields comply with the format and content rules set out in the technical standards on reporting. It is expected that upon implementation by the TRs, a failure to comply with the requirements will compel the TR to reject the report. This, believes ESMA, is an important step towards better data quality because a rejected report will indicate which fields are not reported in compliance with EMIR and ought therefore to be corrected, which will allow counterparties to improve their reporting to meet the EMIR standards.

The validation controls that TRs will put in place are based on the original rules specified in the EMIR technical standards which were published in December 2012 and entered into force on 12 February 2014. No additional reporting requirements are introduced.
 
In order to allow themselves enough lead-in time to get ready for the 'second level' validation process, ESMA expects the TRs to be able to validate everything by the end of October.