dmueller2001's blog

June 30, 2010 — 7:23am ET | By Ron Miller a Guest Post by Diane Mueller ( reposted from FierceContentManagement.com )

These are interesting times for Financial Content providers and consumers. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) put the first stake in the ground during the Cox administration when they mandated the use of XBRL and began in stages to require large public companies to submit XBRL-tagged documents to the SEC, turning corporate financial statements into more easily searchable and comparable documents.  

Congress tries to expand it

Back in May, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), introduced the Government Information Transparency Act (H.R. 2392) in an attempt to standardize the collection of business information throughout federal agencies. It would require agencies to use a single data standard (XBRL) and require that collected information be made readily available for public access.

This month, I found myself suddenly following legislative twitter feeds as the Members of the House of Representatives and Senate debated amendments to the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform bill that included a discussion of requirements that companies use a standard like XBRL when reporting financial data to federal agencies.

Read more: Where content meets code: U.S. SEC mandates, Python and financial content - FierceContentManagement http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/where-content-meets-code-us-sec-mandates-python-and-financial-content/2010-06-30#ixzz0sMDvzPID
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The XBRL International Steering Committee and the XBRL International Standards Board have approved the publication of the Inline XBRL Specification and the associated registry of specified transformations as a RECOMMENDATION. A conformance suite accompanies this. In addition an open source reference implementation of a validator and extractor has been provided.

For more details please see http://www.xbrl.org/SpecRecommendations/

by George Farkas, CEO/ Founder, XBI Software Inc

It is most welcome that in the Federal 2010 budget, the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty announced that they would establish a Red Tape Reduction Commission. A second edition of a study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), “Prosperity Restricted by Red Tape,” estimates that businesses in Canada currently spend over $30 billion each year complying with regulations. This amount is much too high, especially for small business, which is the most important element in stimulating our economy and employment.

XBRL Canada welcomed this announcement. In February, 2007, their annual conference was dedicated to explaining the cost of compliance (red tape). In the report “Reducing the Burden of Compliance through Standardization”, it was pointed out that reducing the compliance burden has two components: One is reducing the amount of information demanded by government. The other is reducing the difficulty in supplying the information that is required.

The new red tape reduction commission should include recommendations:

TORONTO March 10 /CNW/ -  The announcement in the Federal Budget Document tabled in the House of Commons on March 4 that includes a Red Tape Reduction Commission is a welcome move for Canadian business. The complexities of compliance mandated by government agencies are substantial and often redundant. At present, companies who file with the federal departments and agencies must file a diverse number of different reports, usually in different formats. The inefficiency of this approach costs reporting companies substantial dollars in unnecessary expense for systems maintenance, multiple data input and completion of various forms. Leveraging the efficiencies of a unified system employing XBRL could save considerable dollars. It is important to note that XBRL is an open standard currently in various stages of use worldwide.

Over twenty countries have implemented programs to reduce the compliance burden and red tape for companies reporting to government agencies. In several of these countries, XBRL is well recognized as an important part of achieving efficiency within these programs.