A validation system is provided for validating the general structure of XML documents, for example ACORD documents, with a schema validation engine and a schema, for example an ACORD schema. A rules profile, containing a carrier's rules for ACORD documents, is set up and stored in storage. A rules engine further validates a received ACORD document with the rules contained in the rules profile. For efficient coding, the rules engine uses a combination of a scripting language (Groovy--which is the standard scripting language for Java) and dot notation to describe exactly how the levels of the ACORD document are to be traversed, so that a single expression (that looks like a long variable name) is used to directly access the data in the document. A programmer simply writes a single long variable name that specifies exactly the data needed and makes that data available to use during validation.