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Diane Mueller to chair panel on Best Practices & Current Approaches to Rendering XBRL at XBRL US Technology Workshop, July 28-30, Santa Clara, CA

xbrlspy — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:51:08 +0000

In-depth case studies and practical hands-on sessions will be featured

WASHINGTON,DC , June July 13 – XBRL US, the nonprofit consortium for XML business reporting, will host its first annual Pacific Rim Technology Workshop at Hitachi Data Systems Headquarters in Santa Clara, California on July 28-30, 2009. The objective of the 2 ½ day workshop is to bring together XML and XBRL developers, and product managers to share ideas and discuss possible solutions to issues in development. Participants in the workshop will attend hands-on sessions and open discussion groups covering topics such as maintenance, development, and change management, among others.

“XBRL has the potential to transform the world of business reporting, and we are dedicated to continuing to drive the standard forward,” said Diane Mueller, BOD member of XBRL International, Inc. and vice president, XBRL development for JustSystems. “XBRL improves transparency and accuracy of financial information – letting key stakeholders make better business decisions. Also, with the SEC’s mandate for XBRL now in place, getting together under one roof will give attendees access to the information and tools they need to move forward with XBRL adoption.”

Diane will chair the panel on Day 2 of the conference on Best Practices and Current Approaches for Rendering XBRL which will include presentations from Rivet Software, Fujitsu America, Q4 Websystems, and JustSystems.

Also to be covered at the conference:

Participatory panel discussions on rendering, versioning, data quality and validation, tagging approaches, business analytics
Practical, hands-on taxonomy maintenance workshop covering the change management process as told through case studies from around the world
Updates on activities in XML and XBRL development worldwide

Additional speakers will include:

Michael Travis, Chief Operating Officer and Board of Directors, Hitachi Information & Telecommunication Systems Global Holding Company
Steve Wright, Director of Innovation, Salesforce.com on Impact Investing
XBRL and XML experts from CoreFiling, Ernst & Young, Fujitsu, Informatica, JustSystems, Morningstar, Oracle Corporation, Q4 Web Systems, Rivet Software, UBmatrix, XBRL US and others

When: July 28-30, 2009, workshop starts at 2pm on the first day; full days July 29 and 30

Where: Hitachi Data Systems Headquarters, Santa Clara, CA

Who should attend:Product managers, XML and XBRL developers

Complimentary media passes are available for the press. To get a complimentary pass, email Lynne.hasluck@xbrl.us.

The conference will be held at Hitachi headquarters in Santa Clara, California. To learn more and to register for the event, go to http://xbrl.us/techworkshop.

About XBRL

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a royalty-free, open specification for software that uses XML data tags to describe business and financial information for public and private companies and other organizations. XBRL benefits all members of the information supply chain by utilizing a standards-based method with which users can prepare, publish in a variety of formats, exchange and analyze business and financial statements and the information they contain.

About XBRL US

XBRL US is the non-profit consortium for XML business reporting standards in the United States and is a jurisdiction of XBRL International. It represents the business information supply chain, including accounting firms, software companies, financial databases, financial printers and government agencies. Its mission is to support the implementation of XML business reporting standards through the development of taxonomies relevant for use by US public and private sectors, working with a goal of interoperability between sectors, and by promoting adoption of these taxonomies through the collaboration of all business reporting supply chain participants. XBRL US has developed taxonomies to support U.S. GAAP and common reporting practices, the Risk Return Summary in mutual fund prospectuses and the Schedule of Investments under contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The XBRL US GAAP Taxonomies are available for review at http://xbrl.us/taxonomies/Pages/US-GAAP2009.aspx.

Link: www.xbrl.us

CONTACT: Michelle Savage, Vice President, Communication, XBRL US, Inc., michelle.savage@xbrl.us, +1-917-747-1714

Making the Case for Inline XBRL

dmueller2001 — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:40:46 +0000

By Diane Mueller, Chair, XBRL International Technical Working Group on Rendering

Web 2.0 technologies like XML, web services and social networking have taken off like wildfire and have caught many accounting professionals off-guard. The accounting profession only recently put down their pens and made the move from paper to spreadsheets and electronic forms for processing and visualizing financial data.

Accountants and regulators alike require a visual representation of the financial reports before approving their release or attesting to the authenticity of a financial document. There is an almost gut-level need harkening back to the days of the abacus and stone tablets to an almost instinctual need to touch and see the numbers in order to believe and trust in their authenticity.

Both preparers and consumers of business reports work with human readable documents containing a very broad range of formatting decisions. Some of these formatting decisions — such as presentation order of the information or accessibility — even have legal ramifications. There is still a clear need to be able to refer to the “hard copy” — even where the “hard copy” refers to an on-screen document.

Professionals responsible for the production and dissemination of business reports are generally concerned that the information they release is carefully formatted. Accounting documents (particularly financial disclosures) attract special attention from preparers, auditors and securities regulators. The manner in which the reports are formatted — from ensuring that figures are correctly aligned, to making sure sub-totals and totals are suitably emphasized all the way through, to considering the font-size of footnotes — is important. Individual preparers have different preferences and these, too, need to be taken into account.

On the other hand, computers and consuming applications of financial data prepared by accountants care very little about the visual representation of the incoming content. Computers are only concerned with number-crunching, comparability, searchablity and further processing of the data. Most consuming applications have alternative visualizations of financial data in mind rather than the staid financial statements prepared lovingly by the accountants. Dashboards, charts and graphs, and 3-D representations of complex models fed by streams of financial data from multiple sources are the charge of consuming applications with distribution to multiple channels — mobile devices, browsers, desktops and just about anything with a display screen that hosts a picture rather than a financial report.

Why Do We Need Inline XBRL?

With the widespread adoption of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) as the de-facto standard for delivery of financial data, a clear design issue quickly became apparent — XBRL instance documents contain well defined facts but no formatting. XBRL was designed to support the machine-to-machine transmission of financial data, and as such, has succeeded beyond its originators’ wildest dreams with adoption moving forward on a global scale.

The XBRL technical community assumed that the accounting and regulatory community would move more quickly to a world view that ‘trusted’ machine-to-machine transmission — letting go of this seemingly archaic need to “see” some form of visual representation of a financial report for review prior to submission to regulators or publication to shareholders.

However, early on, there was a push from both the accounting and regulatory communities to publish XBRL-tagged financial and business information for display in situations where the producer wants to preserve a specific visual presentation of the information. This is necessary because the order and presentation of the information can often have legal interpretive ramifications for the consumers of that information.

It became necessary to create an extension to the XBRL 2.1 standard to enable the machine-readable data to co-exist with human-readable formats. Inline XBRL was developed to make it possible to deliver structured, machine-readable data inside a human-readable rendering of the data.

It is easier for software developers — especially accounting software vendors — to create reports in HTML, the universal language for web browsers, and add hidden metadata which can be used to construct a machine-readable copy of the same information.

Inline XBRL makes it possible to extract an XBRL instance document on demand. This means that the technique makes it feasible for regulators, exchanges, banks and others responsible for the collection of business reports in XBRL format to ask preparers to merely submit their information as an Inline XBRL document. This is a human-readable XHTML file that can be stored and redistributed in this original format. At any time, an XBRL instance document can be extracted from the XHTML document, validated and passed on to relevant analytical and consuming applications and processes.

This means that vendors need only work out how to create XHTML documents and can adapt their existing report rendering capabilities to format business reports. The Inline XBRL specification defines the syntax for such documents and describes how the syntax maps into an XBRL instance.

Inline XBRL in Action

Recently, a normative stylesheet was developed by the XBRL International consortium as an implementation reference and released on SourceForge as an open source project. The stylesheet enables users to reliably and predictably strip out the unstructured information from the XHTML, then extract and create a valid XBRL instance document. This approach to financial content delivery is simpler, provides more control and flexibility in report formatting, and can be fairly easily implemented. The extracted XBRL instance document is now machine-readable and is fully compliant with the XBRL 2.1 standard for use by regulators and other consumers of financial information. The recently released project can be found on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/inlinexbrl/

Using on the Sourceforge Inline XBRL project code, a Firefox Add-on to 'distill' or extract from an Inline XBRL web page has also been released. This Add-on will, after the installation in Firefox, automatically recognize when Firefox is viewing an inlineXBRL web page. Whenever the web page has iXBRL syntax included, a status bar button is activated. By pressing the button, a sidebar will shows the extracted XBRL information. You can save the extraction result as XBRL instances in xml or as zip archive. For more information, visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12836

The first large-scale use of Inline XBRL is being rolled out in the UK as the outcome of communication minister, Lord Carter’s Report’s recommendations to make the use of XBRL for online filings mandatory. The HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is rolling out a phased implementation for Tax Computations and Accounts (CT600 filings) as part of the its annual self-assessment regime for Company Tax reporting. By 2012, all filings will be online and using Inline XBRL.

Inline XBRL addresses XBRL’s rendering issues by putting it back in the hands of the producing applications — where it belongs. Currently, production applications control layout, look and feel, and branding for paper, web and PDF output. Why should XBRL be any different? With Inline XBRL, both preparer and consumer are guaranteed the same rendering when either party views the document in any browser. To find out more about Inline XBRL, please visit http://www.xbrl.org.

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Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past decade. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane@justsystems.com. You may also follow Diane on Twitter at @XBRLspy.

About JustSystems and XBRL

Along with the SEC, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation, XBRL International, and many other organizations worldwide, JustSystems has been aggressively supporting the development of the XBRL standard and integrating the interactive data format into its xfy platform. JustSystems’ software solutions work with XBRL to enable a richer way of working with and utilizing information, leveraging our technology around information search and retrieval, semantics, document management, and data integration. To learn more about our products for accelerating the creation, quality and consistency of the financial content that your organization produces and consumes today, please visit http://na.justsystems.com/xfyXBRLReport.

Please feel free to publish the above commentary in full or in part with attribution according to the Creative Commons license.

JustSystems Addresses Connection between XBRL, RDF and Semantic Web

xbrlspy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:59:11 +0000

Session at 2009 Semantic Technology Conference Highlights How XBRL Brings Precise Semantics to Financial Data

The presentation is now available for download (~8M) at http://bit.ly/zbcH2

San Jose — June 16, 2009 Recent accounting scandals have heightened the need for transparency in reporting of financial data. Companies are now required to submit regular reports and disclosures conforming to accepted accounting principles like International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (U.S. GAAP). Financial regulators around the world have also mandated that these reports be tagged using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). As large repositories of XBRL data are now being collected, the quality of data submission is on the rise.

Diane Mueller, vice president, XBRL development for JustSystems, and vice chair of XBRL International, Inc.; and Dave Raggett, JustSystems-sponsored W3C Fellow and member of the XBRL International Standards Board (XSB), spoke about XBRL at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference held June 14-18 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA. The session titled, “XBRL, RDF and the Semantic Web,” took place on Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The presentation is available for download (~8M) at http://www.xbrlspy.org/sites/xbrlspy.org/files/MuellerRaggettSeTech2009XBRLRDFandSemanticWebv3.pdf

During the session, the presenters addressed how XBRL brings precise semantics to financial data via reference to external accounting principles. By combining XBRL and the semantic web, there is tremendous potential for analyzing and exploring vast amounts of financial information on companies and markets worldwide.

For more information on the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, visit http://www.semantic-conference.com/. For more information on JustSystems, visit http://www.justsystems.com/ and the JustSystems XBRL Knowledge Center at http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl. For additional perspectives, visit and subscribe to the JustSystems RSS blog feed at http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl_blog, and follow Diane Mueller on Twitter at @XBRLspy.

About JustSystems

JustSystems is a leading global software provider with three decades of successful innovation in office productivity, information management, and consumer and enterprise software. With over 2,500 customers worldwide, the company is continuing a global expansion strategy based on its xfy enterprise software, XMetaL content lifecycle solutions, and its pioneering work in enabling XBRL financial reporting technologies. JustSystems is one of the 2008 KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management, a 2008 EContent 100 member, and was recognized on the 2008 KMWorld Trend-Setting Product list for XMetaL. Major strategic partnerships include IBM, Oracle and EMC. For more information, please visit http://www.justsystems.com. All brand names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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Media Contact: Elena Annuzzi for JustSystems 650-704-8664 Elena@TECHMarket.com

SEC announces availability of New 2009 US GAAP taxonomy

xbrlspy — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:17:33 +0000

The SEC announced today that registrants can start utilizing the 2009 version of the US GAAP taxonomy on July 22, 2009. The US GAAP 2009 Taxonomies are in the process of being loaded into the EDGAR system and will be available for use on July 22, 2009. The US SEC is strongly encouraging companies to begin working with this new taxonomy now. Tt is publicly available at http://xbrl.us/taxonomies/Pages/US-GAAP2009.aspx. Companies should use the latest available taxonomy for their entire fiscal year. However, due to delays in the release of this US GAAP 2009 taxonomy being made available, companies will be permitted to use the U.S. GAAP 1.0 taxonomy in their first required submission before switching to the US GAAP 2009 taxonomy.

See below for the full text posted at http://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/edgartaxonomies.shtml

Is your Investor Relations Web Site Ready for XBRL?

dmueller2001 — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:15:47 +0000

The US SEC issued new rules requiring companies to provide financial statement information in a new interactive data format that is intended to improve its usefulness to investors. Companies are now required to provide their financial statements on their corporate Web sites in interactive data format using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) not later than the calendar day that they submit their financial statements to the Commission (1). In this format, financial statement information can be viewed interactively from your investor relations websites, downloaded directly into spreadsheets, analyzed in a variety of ways using commercial off-the-shelf software, and used within investment models in other software formats.

The US SEC rules will apply to public companies and foreign private issuers that prepare their financial statements in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (U.S. GAAP), and foreign private issuers that prepare their financial statements using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).

This interactive data format must be provided as an exhibit to all periodic and current reports and registration statements, as well as to transition reports for a change in fiscal year. The new rules are intended not only to make financial information easier for investors to analyze, but also to assist in automating regulatory filings and business information processing. Interactive data has the potential to increase the speed, accuracy and usability of financial disclosure, and eventually reduce costs.

The XBRL Challenge

Until now, individual investors could obtain only high-level key financial figures for large companies together with their stock price history from sites like Yahoo! Finance and MSN/Money. Institutional investors and research firms with deeper pockets could obtain real-time financial data feeds from pay-per-view data aggregators like EDGAR-Online. However, these data sources are highly normalized, disconnected from the source, and lack any semantic annotations. These data sources are fed by automated screen-scraper aggregation applications culling information from the HTML or ASCII filings, and then mapped to the data aggregators’ various relational databases. This extraction process is expensive and error prone, especially when data has to be re-mapped to data aggregators’ relational databases prior to distribution to their various subscription-based data feeds. Also lost in this aggregation process are essential features of financial information: access to the reporting entities’ ‘as-reported’ story, trust in the authenticity of the content and granular detail. Data aggregated in this manner is not able to reflect the reporting entities’ as-reported financials.

The SEC ruling in January 2009 introduces a phased mandate for filing in XBRL starting with the largest companies in June 2009 and then extending to all sizes of companies over the next three years. As a result, we can expect to see very large amounts of financial data becoming available in a machine interpretable format (XBRL). The challenge is to exploit this data to provide new kinds of services to investors.

XBRL is a bit like drinking from a fire hose, there is a tremendous amount of metadata associated with each fact and there are lots of facts. This means that financial data has become a lot more interactive with an emphasis on helping users to make sense of the data. What distinguishes XBRL is the precise semantics attached to every reported fact. This makes it easy to pull out specific figures and concepts, and facilitates accurate comparison. XBRL metadata also enables both drill-down to granular detail and linking to reference sources like definitions, rulings, and accounting standards documentation sets.

How to take advantage of this opportunity

Now is the time to enable your Investor Relations Website to comply with US SEC Mandate.

•   Expose this metadata-rich source data in ways that make it easily consumable by Search engines.
•   Provide data accurately without loss of the providence of the source files (linked data).
•   Enable users to share this content in social network and Web 2.0 applications
•   Improve the find-ability of your financial information
•   Deliver accurately rendered sharable ‘as reported’ views of your filings
•   Enable your content to remain connected to the source whenever the content is reused
•   Improving ‘trust’ in the provenance of the source of the information
•   Enable previously unattainable levels of granularity of information.

First, you need to ensure that your Investor Web Site is ready and able to accept and post XBRL filings in an easily discoverable and permanently linkable manner. It is important that you clearly identify the data that you control on your Investor Relations Web Site. By assigning URIs (hyperlinks) to resources (actual XBRL-tagged Filings), you enable other people to talk about them, link to them, and return to them with ease.

URLs like this are really unhelpful:

http://www.mycompany.com/IR/b518b359b4abd4df0d6f7f129770b078/compdetails

A better approach is to use a URI scheme like this:

http://www.mycompany.com/IR/{CompanyId}/{filingtype}/{year}/{number}

Using such a numerical-based canonical URI provides an explicit hierarchical scheme that is much easier for search engines and other web browsing tools to discover. This approach represents the data in a way that people can use and enable you to expose the data to a wider world in a repeatable fashion.

Secondly, to simply post the Raw XBRL files may not be enough. You should also consider delivering a rendered view of your XBRL-tagged SEC filings alongside the Raw XBRL Filings. As at this early stage in adoption, there are only a few desktop applications available to consume the XBRL Content and you will want make sure that your site’s visitors can take advantage of the Interactive data and access the rich semantic metadata-enhanced XBRL-tagged financial reports immediately.

Finally, although the SEC Ruling only requires that XBRL data to be made available for at least 12 months on an issuer’s Web site(2) - it would be wise to continue to host your data on a longer, more permanent basis - links that disappear after twelve months can be very frustrating for users of that content and can create broken links in Search Engines. In additon, keeping the data around long term allows you to continue to control the data and allow for your site's visitors to perform historical analysis on your financials without having to look elsewhere to search for each filing individual on the US SEC EDGAR site or subscribe to expensive data feed..

By hosting your own financial content as XBRL on your Investor Relations website becomes infinitely more discoverable by search engines and therefore accessible to potential investors and shareholders. This is because the US SEC blocks all search engines, including Google, MSN, Yahoo, and so on, from indexing any files at the the SEC.gov Web site. This practice impedes access to the content individual investors from easily linking to and aggregating filings for their own research purposes. Instead, the SEC continues it's practice of licensing this data on a for fee basis to data aggregators.This is done by the SEC and other goverment Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, iwhich is s a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Now, there is nothing wrong with blocking misbehaving Web crawlers is important and necessary.

This new approach will enable your content to remain connected to the source improving ‘trust’ in the provenance of the source of the information and enabling a previously unattainable level of granularity of information.

If you take these few important steps you will be vastly improving the find-ability of your financial information, enable your site’s visitors to view your filings in real-time, share them with colleagues across social networks, link to the filings directly on your site, and eliminate the barriers to access to your key stakeholders.

Footnotes:

(1) The day the registration statement or report is submitted electronically to the Commission may not be the business day on which it was deemed officially filed. For example, a filing submitted after 5:30 p.m. generally is not deemed officially filed until the following business day. Under the new rules, the Web posting will be required at any time on the same calendar day that the related registration statement or report is deemed officially filed or required to be filed, whichever is earlier.

(2)The inital proposing release did not specify that the XBRL data would be required to be posted for at least 12 months on an issuer’s Web site, but commenters requested clarification and the SEC did make an clarifying amendment to the ruling.

SEC to Hold Public Seminar on New Interactive Data Reporting Requirements

xbrlspy — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:00:41 +0000

The Securities and Exchange Commission will conduct a public seminar on June 10 from noon to 3 p.m. ET to help companies and preparers comply with new rules that require financial reports to be filed using interactive data (XBRL).

The Commission staff will present information about the technology requirements for complying with the rules and will also provide an overview of the tools and information provided by the Commission to assist with compliance. The seminar will also cover frequently asked questions about the rules and technology requirements.

In adopting the final rule, the Commission noted that interactive data has the potential to increase the speed, accuracy, and usability of financial disclosure and eventually reduce costs.

This event will be held in the auditorium at the SEC's headquarters at 100 F Street, N.E., in Washington, D.C. The seminar will be open to the public with seating on a first-come, first-served basis. The seminar also will be webcast via the SEC Web site. Captioning of the webcast will be provided. Reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities attending this event in person can be arranged by submitting a request to DisabilityProgramOfficer@SEC.gov three business days prior to the event.

To ensure the seminar is responsive to the needs of companies and preparers, the Commission staff is seeking suggested questions and topics to be discussed at the seminar. Interested parties should email their questions to Ask-OID@sec.gov and include in the subject line "Public Education Seminar."

For additional information about the seminar, contact Ask-OID@sec.gov or (202) 551-4144.

Semantic XBRL Data Search Using SPARQL

xbrlspy — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:03:03 +0000

Semantic XBRL Data Search Using SPARQL -from HitachiDataInteractive.com Written by Ashu Bhatnagar

We all use Google for Web searches on a daily basis and admire the simplicity of its front-end user interface. It’s nice, clean, fast, and simple. Behind this simplicity lie sophisticated index databases and advanced search technologies, but we as users don’t need to know or understand these. All we need to know are smart keywords that help direct our searches from hundreds of billions of marked-up HTML pages scattered across the global Internet.

When we try to search using regular SQL database search technologies, though, we run into difficulties. Why? Because most of this web content is in distributed HTML flat files and isn’t organized in any centralized database with well defined data structures and schema. It’s like a world full of roads with no roadmaps. Go discover!

Search engines like Google, Ask, and others find the content that matches with our queries by building and employing centralized databases that contain metadata, where every keyword acts as a tag and has fast and efficient links to corresponding websites. In other words, a search engine acts like a very knowledgeable guide for us, responding to our queries with found/not found answers based on the Internet roads it has access to and has crawled before. Read more at Semantic XBRL Data Search Using SPARQL

Why not use such a powerful search front-end to query financial research data? During my experience working with both sell-side and buy-side research analysts, there has been a long standing request to build such a tool, but until recently, the short answer to this request has been “No!”

No, because it’s technically too difficult or it’s too expensive.

No, because Google deals with text and not data, which has both context and meaning. Data is far more challenging to search, because even when it’s on the Web, it is marked up with HTML as text, not as data, thereby losing its context for meaningful search.

No, because there are no generally accepted standard financial dictionaries, or taxonomies, that define terms such as revenue, sales, or net income as synonyms.

Until recently this list of No’s has been long. The good news is that the list is now shrinking quickly with the increasing adoption of XBRL and EDGAR standard taxonomies and the release of several XBRL tools.

All that is needed to accomplish powerful search of financial research data is to subscribe to the SEC’s XBRL filings as free RSS feeds, extract XBRL data into our own relational or Google-like index databases, and use SQL to find answers to our queries. As an alternative, we could subscribe to third-party data services firms like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Factset and others that would add XBRL data to their current aggregate data and continue to offer this as a service.

The news gets even better when we add SPARQL, a W3C specified query language for RDF, to XBRL and Linked Data.

Jim Rapoza, Chief Technology Analyst of eWeek, explains:

Called SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), this standard brings about a standardized SQL-like query language for the Semantic Web. And, like most Semantic Web standards, it is heavily based on RDF (Resource Description Framework), although it also makes use of many Web services standards, such as WSDL (Web Services Description Language).

SPARQL essentially consists of a standard query language, a data access protocol and a data model (which is basically RDF).

Some people out there are probably thinking, So what? Sounds like just another search tool—big whoop. But there’s a big difference between blindly searching the entire Web and querying actual data models.

The ability of database queries to pull data from giant databases is pretty much the basis of a large number of enterprise applications. No one argues about the value of being able to write a query in an application that can pull relevant customer and product data.

Now, imagine writing a similarly small application that does the same thing—only with data stored across the entire World Wide Web.

That would include all the companies who not only file in XBRL but also, in conformance to SEC requirements, will be posting XBRL data on their own company websites.

In essence, with SPARQL, we can choose to build centralized databases to query XBRL data, but we don’t have to. We simply can point our queries to so-called SPARQL endpoints that — unlike traditional database requests that must be under one administrative control — can span the Web over thousands of company websites with XBRL data and obtain results as if they came from one centralized database. Imagine the cost savings in not having to build and maintain a huge and growing centralized database.

Applications for publishing XBRL as Linked Open Data are limited at this time, but they are emerging. As one example, Roberto García and Rosa Gil describe their work undertaken at a Research Group at Universitat de Lleida, Spain, which extracted 1.34 million triples from 612 XBRL filings. (Triples are semantic data elements in RDF format.) The process of extraction is machine automated and results in transforming XBRL data into Semantic Web formatted RDF data.

In addition, sufficient examples in the current Web exist to give us insight into how the user experience might look when Semantic XBRL applications go into production use. Next time you search for the best flight for your air travel on sites such as Orbitz, Kayak, or FareCompare, take a pause and observe that the flight schedules, prices and airline details are being pulled not from any one centralized database but from a variety of airline databases, in real time, to match your exact itinerary requirements, thanks to some very specialized and complex technologies.

In summary, SPARQL makes Semantic XBRL searches possible on-demand across a distributed web space while simplifying front-end design, and keeping the complexity of technology hidden and out of sight from end users.

A Google-like experience of searchable financial research data is coming. The future looks bright.

Ashu Bhatnagar is CEO of Good Morning Research, a Softpark company that specializes in building Semantic XBRL technology. The GoodMorningResearch.com machine automates XBRL tagging of Excel data in RDF format with one-click Save As XBRL functionality. Mr. Bhatnagar also moderates the Semantic XBRL group on LinkedIn.

[Hitachi Data Interactive]

Bill would mandate using XBRL to track TARP money - fcw.com

xbrlspy — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:02:35 +0000

By Matthew Weigelt - May 15, 2009

Measure would standardize business information collection

A House bill would require to the government to track where its money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) goes by using technology that many companies already use to monitor their financial reporting.

The Government Information Transparency Act (H.R. 2392), introduced May 14 by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), would standardize the collection of business information throughout agencies. It would require agencies to use a single data standard known as eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and require that collected information be made readily available for public access.

XBRL has benefits in preparing and analyzing business information. It offers greater efficiency and better accuracy and reliability of data to all involved in supplying or using financial data, experts say. It’s also an open standard, free of license fees, according to XBRL International, a nonprofit consortium of 550 companies and agencies that promote the language.

XBRL tags enable automated processing of business information by computer software, cutting out laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison. Computers can recognize information in a XBRL document and exchange it with other computers. Experts say XBRL increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information.

“The technology exists to create real transparency that would allow us to track TARP dollars and value toxic assets, but the federal government is far behind the curve in implementing available solutions,” said Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

U.S. banks are currently required to disclose information to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in XBRL format. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently approved a final rule mandating the use of XBRL for all public-company reporting, with some companies required to start complying in June.

“This legislation offers more than the promise of change and transparency, it is a substantive plan to implement it,” Issa said.

The bill was referred to the oversight committee.

http://fcw.com/articles/2009/05/15/legislation-requires-xbrl-technology.aspx

Lawmaker Calls for Bailout Formatting

xbrlspy — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:53:01 +0000

By Aliya Sternstein

A Republican House member proposed a measure on Thursday that would demand banks receiving bailout funds hand over business results in a special format that is easily accessible, after many open government advocates had urged the administration to require such formatting.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, introduced legislation, H.R. 2392, to standardize federal collection, analysis and publication of financial information regarding the business of companies through the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

"The technology exists to create real transparency that would allow us to track TARP dollars and value toxic assets but the Federal government is far behind the curve in implementing available solutions," Issa stated in a press release. "This legislation offers more than the promise of change and transparency, it is a substantive plan to implement it."

http://techinsider.nextgov.com/2009/05/lawmaker_calls_for_bailout_for.php

Rebuilding Public Trust: The Case for Compliant Financial Data

dmueller2001 — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:41:06 +0000

By Diane Mueller
In the aftermath of banking failures, subprime mortgages, and bailouts across multiple industry sectors, it is a good time to examine the strategies it will take to rebuild public trust in our government and in the world’s financial markets. I believe the answer depends both on what we can do and how we do it.

With all the financial information that corporations were obligated to report because of existing government regulations, how could we not have foreseen this financial disaster? Did we misread the data? Was the information in the reports incorrect? Is there more that should have been required to report? What was missing were regulations that properly addressed how the information was to be reported. Being specific on the “how” may very well have provided the warnings of the impending disaster rather than finding out how bad it was in the midst of it.

The key to solving the problem is figuring out the best way to publish our data.

A major step towards solving the problem of how to report financial information has been addressed in the latest set of regulations from the U.S. SEC. The regulations now require a growing number of companies to provide financial statement information in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Once all companies that are required to report use this format, analysts will be able to provide more accurate and timely warnings. Rather than using the past rules of demanding information — whether locked inside spreadsheets, forms, PDFs, the web, and other proprietary formats — specifying XBRL makes the data more usable and more easily gathered and analyzed.

If we can’t find the data, if we can’t figure out the problems that may be buried in the mountains of information, and if we haven’t any means to explore the data, we are no better prepared for the next financial crisis.

Creating Compliant Data

To complete the true financial picture of our economy, we need to complete the move to XBRL to ensure that all financial reporting is available as XBRL-tagged content. The government also needs to use XBRL reporting as part of creating a complete picture of the economy. As the bailout legislation, Recovery Act and other massive appropriations that include requirements for public disclosure continue, XBRL reporting could provide an excellent method of measuring the effects to the economy in real-time. Usually economic indicators lag behind because time is needed for surveys and reports to be collected and processed.

The initial impact of new regulations layered on top of existing regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley will be that corporations will be obligated to publish even more data, more frequently. The Obama administration’s effort to push more government data out via Recovery.gov is a good example of the movement to encourage more disclosure. If that information was in XBRL, we could more easily use the data. As the government rolls out its mandate for corporations to submit their financials using XBRL to the U.S. SEC for closer scrutiny and better compliance, they could also take a page from their own book and make all government financial reporting available to the public in XBRL, facilitating a more open national dialogue on our government’s financial health.

As Obama said in his Memorandum on Transparency, “Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.” This information needs to be compiled in a harmonized, compliant fashion across agencies to facilitate its preservation, dissemination, and exploitation and to maximize the research that is derived from it.

Connecting the Data

Like pages on the web, we intuitively know that the public data being posted to sites like SEC.gov and Recovery.gov is interconnected with other sources of data. But discovering the connections when all the data is in disparate formats is next to impossible for most — even the expert research analysts at times. The government has already started to require XBRL with positive results in terms of access to data, so there should be no reason not to settle on XBRL for all financial reporting by companies and government entities alike. Beyond any specific qualities of XBRL, just by using the same format, reporting and analyzing the reports is faster and more likely to be accurate.

Further transformations like those proposed at recovery.gov (such as a service to transform the data to RDF-tagged semantic data) can allow the financial data in XBRL to be combined with data from other industry and government sectors — transforming the way we explore information.

In addition, the data about the data needs to be discoverable. Just having information in a usable format does little without it being easily accessible. Any kind of data object or concept should be found at a specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so that people can look up specific names, get useful information, and discover more.

As Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, put it, “It is about making links, so that a person or a machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other related data.”

Another consideration is trusting the provenance of the data itself — maintaining the connection to the source of the data whether it’s a filing on the SEC website or a recovery.gov document listing all the grant recipients for bailout funds. If the link (or URL) to the primary data source is lost, the connection and the provenance of the data is no longer assumable and any derived research loses its authenticity. When posting financial information for public consumption, entities enter into an unspoken agreement to maintain those links with the consumers. As more and more data is available online, the long-term stability of government sites and the continued maintenance of links must be guaranteed. The links are the mechanisms that will enable us to trace back to the sources and link us to the authoritative literature; whether that content is a Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) ruling, a Senate Bill allocating billions of bailout dollars, or the financial data related to an entity’s compliance with these rules and regulations.

If governments and corporations publish financial information using harmonized data standards and ensure that relevant links are maintained and accessible, this will go a long way to improve finding the location of relevant data. Public scrutiny will diminish, and we will again trust the financial markets and the agencies that regulate them.

###

Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past nine years. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane[@]justsystems.com.

About JustSystems and XBRL

Along with the SEC, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation, XBRL International, and many other organizations worldwide, JustSystems has been aggressively supporting the development of the XBRL standard and integrating the interactive data format into its xfy platform. JustSystems’ software solutions work with XBRL to enable a richer way of working with and utilizing information, leveraging our technology around information search and retrieval, semantics, document management, and data integration. To learn more about how to accelerate the creation, quality, and consistency of the financial content that your organization produces and consumes today or to participate in the JustSystems beta program, please visit http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl_blog/.

Please feel free to publish the above commentary in full or in part with attribution according to the Creative Commons license.

XBRL US Survey Finds Most Companies Ready for SEC’s XBRL Reporting Mandate

xbrlspy — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:11:27 +0000

At least 2/3 of companies in first phase of SEC rule have already created XBRL-formatted financials
WASHINGTON, May 7 /PRNewswire/ -- At least 340 of the estimated 500 public companies that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires to begin filing in XBRL format in June 2009, have already converted their financial statements to XBRL. The survey of leading filing agents was conducted by XBRL US, the non-profit XML standard setter that developed and maintains the US GAAP dictionary (taxonomy) used by filers to comply with the SEC mandate.
The SEC’s mandate of public company reporting in XBRL will be phased in over two years with the largest public companies, those with a worldwide public float of $5 billion or higher, required to comply with the mandate starting with their June 15, 2009 quarter, a group estimated at 500 companies. All other large accelerated filers must comply starting with their June 15, 2010 fiscal quarter and all other publicly traded companies and foreign private issuers will be required to comply starting with their June 15, 2011 fiscal quarter.
“These XBRL financial statements represent almost $7 trillion in market capitalization, over 50% of the total market cap for all publicly traded companies reporting to the SEC. We’re at critical mass and looking forward to extending investor benefits to other asset classes in the future,” said Alfred R. Berkeley, Chairman, Pipeline Financial Systems LLC and Chair, XBRL US Board.
XBRL US finalized and released the 2009 version of the US GAAP Taxonomy on April 21, 2009. This current release incorporates industry changes and new FASB pronouncements and is being used by public companies preparing their financial statements in XBRL to comply with the SEC mandate. XBRL US is also responsible for developing XBRL tags for mutual fund risk/return summary portion of prospectuses and the schedule of investments. These tags are all part of a single, unified and interoperable taxonomy. The taxonomy can be reviewed at http://xbrl.us/taxonomies/Pages/default.aspx

About XBRL
XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a royalty-free, open specification for software that uses XML data tags to describe business and financial information for public and private companies and other organizations. XBRL benefits all members of the information supply chain by utilizing a standards-based method with which users can prepare, publish in a variety of formats, exchange and analyze financial statements and the information they contain. XBRL International is a non-profit consortium of approximately 550 organizations worldwide working together to build the XBRL language and promote and support its adoption. XBRL International is responsible for the technical XBRL specification and each country-specific jurisdiction works to facilitate the development and adoption of local XBRL taxonomies, or dictionaries, consistent with accounting, regulatory, and market standards and practices.
About XBRL US
XBRL US is the non-profit consortium for XML business reporting standards in the United States and is a jurisdiction of XBRL International. It represents the business information supply chain, including accounting firms, software companies, financial databases, financial printers and government agencies. Its mission is to support the implementation of XML business reporting standards through the development of taxonomies relevant for use by US public and private sectors, working with a goal of interoperability between sectors, and by promoting adoption of these taxonomies through the collaboration of all business reporting supply chain participants. XBRL US has developed taxonomies to support U.S. GAAP and common reporting practices, the Risk Return Summary in mutual fund prospectuses and the Schedule of Investments under contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Taxonomies can be found at http://xbrl.us/taxonomies/Pages/default.aspx

AICPA issues Statement of Position on performing AUP engagements that address XBRL-tagged data

xbrlspy — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:22:43 +0000

On January 30, 2009, the SEC issued a release adopting final rules, "Interactive Data to Improve Financial Reporting" (SEC rules), that require issuers to provide their financial statements to the SEC and on their corporate Web sites in interactive data format using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL-tagged data). Today, the AICPA Auditing Standards Board has issued Statement of Position 09-1, Performing Agreed-Upon Procedures Engagements That Address the Completeness, Accuracy, or Consistency of XBRL-Tagged Data. The statement represents the recommendations of the XBRL Assurance Task Force of the AICPA Assurance Services Executive Committee regarding the application of Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements to engagements in which a practitioner performs and reports on agreed-upon procedures related to the completeness, accuracy or consistency of XBRL-tagged data. SOP 09-1 is effective upon issuance. This Statement of Position provides practitioners with guidance on performing agreed-upon procedures engagements that address the completeness, accuracy, or consistency of an entity's XBRL-tagged data of information as of a specified date and for a specified period. The engagement is performed under AT section 201, Agreed- Upon Procedures Engagements (AICPA, Professional Standards, vol. 1) and this SOP includes guidance to assist practitioners in applying certain aspects of AT section 201 to the subject matter of XBRL.

For more information, please visit http://www.cpa2biz.com

JustSystems Launches Beta Program for xfy XBRL Report

xbrlspy — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:33:19 +0000

Government, Corporate Users Invited to Test Unique Desktop Solution for Viewing, Exploring and Reporting on XBRL Data

NEW YORK and VANCOUVER — May 6, 2009 — JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies, today announced the launch of its beta program for xfy XBRL Report. Government and corporate users are invited to test the first and only application that enables users to view, explore and report on multi-dimensional XBRL data; combine it with other content; then publish the results as richly rendered reports to HTML, PDF and other target outputs. “XBRL wasn’t designed for human readability, and that introduces risk at every stage of the information lifecycle — from preparation to the review and analysis used to make operational and investment decisions,” said Diane Mueller, vice president, XBRL development for JustSystems. “xfy XBRL Report provides a trusted rendering and visualization solution for composing and publishing reports in formats designed to be read by people, not machines. Now, users can comply with and take advantage of the XBRL standard without incurring new costs, risk and complexity.”

Availability and Participation

The beta version of xfy XBRL Report is available now. Users interested in participating in the beta program can email beta@justsystems.com.

Inside xfy XBRL Report

JustSystems designed xfy XBRL Report for people who want to review and analyze XBRL data and share their results with others. To that end, xfy XBRL Report consumes XBRL, creating content that uses the XBRL data and publishes it in a web-ready HTML or PDF. Other users can view the published reports without any special software — just a standard web browser. The xfy XBRL Report audience includes:

Filers, who need complete visibility throughout the filing process and a rich environment for rendering and visualizing XBRL data to ensure filings are free of errors, oversights and omissions;
Preparers, who perform internal reviews of XBRL filings and provide a value-added service for client-facing reviews, validation and sign-off;
Auditors, who need to bring together XBRL and non-XBRL data in a rich visual environment and then manipulate and abstract information for complete review, analysis and attestation of corporate filings;
Research Analysts, who need an internal tool for reviewing XBRL filings to provide a platform for adding value-added content and services for investors and other constituents;
Institutional and individual investors, who want to take advantage of the transparency and comparability XBRL data provides by rendering and visualizing XBRL and non-XBRL data from multiple entities and by providing a basis for making informed investment decisions; and
Financial journalists, analysts, investors and other data users, who want instant access to the accurate figures they need for real-time reporting to enhance their own and their clients’ decision making processes.

Highlights of xfy XBRL Report include:

Instant viewing, analysis, and work capabilities with XBRL data — in real time and in human-readable, richly rendered formats;
Viewing of multi-dimensional XBRL-tagged reports;
Interactive viewing experience;
Risk mitigation via instant, interactive access to reviewers of financial data;
Edgar Online I-Metrix connector provides access to Edgar Online data directly from xfy XBRL Report user interface; and
Attribution references let users create views of XBRL data that connect back to the source data.

For more information on JustSystems please visit http://www.justsystems.com/ and the JustSystems XBRL Knowledge Center at http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl .

Recent News and Resources

News release: JustSystems Fortifies $44.7M Strategic Alliance with Keyence; http://na.justsystems.com/releases-228

Executive Commentaries: http://na.justsystems.com/content-commentaries

XBRL Knowledge Center: http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl

About JustSystems JustSystems is a leading global software provider with three decades of successful innovation in office productivity, information management, and consumer and enterprise software. With over 2,500 customers worldwide, the company is continuing a global expansion strategy based on its xfy enterprise software, XMetaL content lifecycle solutions, and its pioneering work in enabling XBRL financial reporting technologies. JustSystems is one of the 2008 KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management, a 2008 EContent 100 member, and was recognized on the 2008 KMWorld Trend-Setting Product list for XMetaL. Major strategic partnerships include IBM, Oracle and EMC. For more information, please visit http://www.justsystems.com. All brand names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. ###

For more information: Elena Annuzzi TECHMarket Communications 650-704-8664 Elena@TECHMarket.com

XBRL International Announces Board of Directors

xbrlspy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:01:40 +0000

Includes Experts in Business Reporting, Accounting, Regulatory Reporting and Standard Setting

XBRL International, Inc. (XII) announced today the establishment of its inaugural Board of Directors comprised of senior leaders and experts with broad international experience in financial, business and regulatory reporting, accounting and standard setting. The Board will advise and assist in executing strategic opportunities as a result of XBRL's growing international adoption, identify critical regulatory and accounting convergence trends for which the XBRL standard could be used as a solution, and develop long-term growth and sustainability strategies for the XBRL international consortium.

"This newly formed XII Board will provide governance direction and strategic vision for our global consortium to assist our more than 600 members spread across 26 jurisdictions achieve their milestones in an integrated, consistent manner," said Anthony Fragnito, CPA, CEO of XBRL International, Inc. "The XBRL business reporting standard has already achieved significant milestones to-date, including mandates or voluntary filing programs in more than 20 countries. We look forward to working with the Board to magnify these efforts and help our members achieve maximum positive impact on capital markets, businesses, investors and regulators."

The newly appointed XII Board members represent a broad global reach:

Mr. Nelson Carvalho from South America (Brazil) and immediate past Chairman of the Standards Advisory Council of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB); Mr. Robert Eccles from North America (United States), Senior Lecturer of the Harvard Business School in Boston;
Mr. Gunnar Miller from Europe, Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Research and Head of European Research and Sector Funds at Allianz Global Investors;
Mr. Mohandas Pai from western Asia (India), Member of the Board of Directors - Human Resources, Education and Research and Administration, Infosys;
Ms. Ying Wei from eastern Asia (China), Deputy Director-General Accounting Regulatory Department of Ministry of Finance.

In addition, three XBRL International Steering Committee members will hold seats on the Board, they include:

Mr. Mike Willis, (United States) Chair of the XII Steering Committee, Partner,PricewaterhouseCoopers;
Ms. Diane Mueller, (Canada) First Vice Chair of the XII Steering Committee, Vice President, XBRL Development, JustSystems and
Ms. Arleen Thomas, (United States) Treasurer of the XII Steering Committee, and Senior Vice President of Member Competency and Development at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).

"One of the XII Board's primary directives will be to expedite the deployment of the XBRL business reporting standard, specifically at the regional and global regulatory level, by working with key decision makers at the highest levels," added Fragnito. "Our Board members have the requisite expertise, vision and professional relationships to help XII accomplish this goal effectively."

The Board will leverage XII's ongoing series of regional and international forums in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas to manage the XBRL standard, educate key decision makers, oversee implementation frameworks and provide strategic direction.

XII Board members will be present during the upcoming 19th XBRL International Conference in Paris on June 23-25.

About XBRL International, Inc.

XBRL International, Inc. (XII) is a global consortium using a cooperative effort to create a common business reporting language based on XML. This Web protocol is being developed and promoted by an international not-for-profit consortium of more than 600 major international public and private companies as well as organizations and government agencies in more than 26 jurisdictions. For more information about XBRL, please visit www.xbrl.org.

XBRL US Publishes 2009 US GAAP Taxonomies for SEC XBRL Mandate

xbrlspy — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:42:18 +0000

XBRL US announced today that it released and posted the digital dictionary for US GAAP reporting which has been accepted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The 2009 release includes hundreds of accounting and industry-specific revisions to the 2008 release.

The SEC mandated XBRL for public company reporting which will be phased in over two years. The largest public companies, those with a worldwide public float of $5 billion or higher must comply with the mandate starting with their June 15, 2009 quarter, a group of approximately 500 companies. All other large accelerated filers must comply starting with their June 15, 2010 fiscal quarter and all other publicly traded companies and foreign private issuers will be required to comply starting with their June 15, 2011 fiscal quarter.

"XBRL US has made a significant investment in development to ensure that new FASB pronouncements and industry standard changes are accurately reflected, and that preparers have resources for compliance. Public companies have been eagerly awaiting the updated taxonomies so that they will have the means to incorporate these changes into their XBRL-formatted financial statements in time for the SEC mandate," said

Michael Schlanger , Senior Vice President, Merrill Corporation and member of the XBRL US Board of Directors. Merrill Corporation is a leading financial printer that offers XBRL preparation services.

FASB pronouncements incorporated since the 2008 release include:

FAS No. 141 (R) - Business Combinations
FAS No. 160 - Non-controlling Interests in Consolidated Financial Statements an amendment of ARB No. 51
FAS No. 161 - Disclosures about Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities an amendment of FASB Statement No. 133
FAS No. 163 - Accounting for Financial Guarantee Insurance Contracts, an interpretation of FASB Statement No. 60

"This first annual update evolves with accounting and industry changes and will improve comparability of public company data from year to year, from company to company," said Campbell Pryde, Chief Standards Officer, XBRL US.

XBRL US is responsible for maintaining the US GAAP Taxonomies under contract with the SEC. The taxonomies can be viewed and downloaded at http://xbrl.us/Pages/US-GAAP.aspx.

Ted Talks: Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data

xbrlspy — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:26:56 +0000

About This Video: 20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

About Tim Berners-Lee: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium, overseeing the Web's standards and development.

XBRL May Help Monitor TARP Spending

xbrlspy — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:57:15 +0000

By WebCPA staff

Interactive data-tagging technology could assist government auditors in monitoring the spending done under the $700-billion-plus financial bailout plan.

Testifying at a hearing before the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee on assessing the Treasury Department’s efforts at preventing waste and abuse of funds in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Mark Bolgiano, president and CEO of XBRL US, described how the interactive data tags would eventually be able to help regulators track the disbursement and use of TARP funds and enable more effective regulation by the government.The Securities and Exchange Commission has recently required that the largest public companies begin using the interactive data-tagging technology, known as Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, when filing their financial statements in June 2009 (see SEC Begins XBRL Mandate for First 500 Companies).

Free the Data: eGov and Open Standards

dmueller2001 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:38:04 +0000

By Diane Mueller

When President Obama appointed his new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, last week, Kundra announced ambitious plans to "democratize" federal government data by making it accessible in open formats and in data feeds. His plan calls for the creation of a single point of access to all public federal information. The idea is to enable the data to be accessed by developers whose applications will open up federal data to the sunlight of millions of citizens by encouraging them to scrutinize how the Recovery Act’s dollars will be spent.

As chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, Kundra raised the bar by making government data more readily accessible to its residents, leveraging pre-existing Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook and YouTube.

Federal agencies are now banding together to plan for how they are going to provide this information in an open, standardized manner that enables citizens to efficiently and accurately mine data, make comparisons, and perform analytics across all government sectors.

All this accessible data sounds well and good until you start looking at it from a developer’s point of view — there is currently little or no uniformity across government agencies for reporting granular federal financial data. With billions of dollars being funneled in grants, loans, and loan guarantees, there needs to be a standard ‘open’ format and shared re-usable taxonomy for both applications and reporting.

What Can We Anticipate from Kundra?

While Kundra’s announcement caused quite a stir in the technology sector, it still remains to be seen if he will have the authority to mandate change or if he will just be a technology advisor to Obama. His role may be limited to making technology recommendations which then have to be adopted into individual agency policies instead of presenting a common technology policy for the government as a whole.

One can only hope that one of Kundra’s first recommendations includes leveraging what has become the de facto global financial reporting open standard — XBRL — to tag and track the billions of Recovery Act dollars. The Obama Administration has committed to enabling an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

Kundra will have to look no further than to the U.S. SEC’s use of RSS feeds and FTP sites to post the recent filings as XBRL. The SEC’s bold move enabled developers to build applications to consume and analyze the data in almost real-time with levels of data accuracy and granularity that could never before be achieved with screen-scraping from untagged data or PDF formats. Previously, the information was only available in normalized data feeds from pay-per-view data aggregators. In another encouraging example and move towards transparency from China, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) recently announced that it has rolled out a platform enabling the download of listed companies’ information tagged with XBRL. As the global financial community moves to free up data in a more accessible manner, the time is now for the U.S. federal government to take similar actions.

It remains to be seen if XBRL will be adopted to track the disbursement and use of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, enabling more effective regulation and providing investors consistent, comparable reporting on the existing pool of securitized assets. Hopefully, Kundra will be listening when XBRL-US presents its report to the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in a hearing today in the U.S. Congress on “Assessing Treasury's Efforts at Preventing Waste and Abuse of TARP Funds.” Yet another opportunity to leverage open standards to aid in federal transparency efforts.

In a recent memorandum, the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Director, Peter Orszag, describes a planned May 5^th launch of a series of Award Transaction Data Feeds. All federal agencies will now be required to provide all Recovery Act assistance transactions in the standard format currently provided to USASpending.gov. In the memo, Orszag placed a high priority on delivering an “accurate display” of information related to the Recovery Act on Recovery.gov. Federal agencies are now scrambling to ensure they comply and that all reporting related to Recovery Act funding is complete and accurate.
It’s not a “window to the federal data” that will allow developers to leverage and create valuable applications, but rather access to the raw data itself, preferably with open standards-based tags from a shared common federal taxonomy of terms. We’re tired of screen-scrapping and trying to data map disparate data sources across federal government agencies. Hopefully federal agencies like the OMB will listen to Kundra and take a page from Facebook and the iPhone and create an open standards-based platform. Then, the application developers will come in droves.
Building an app is easy when you don’t have to worry about shifting data sources, proprietary platforms, and an ever-changing myriad of web services.

Creating a Comprehensive Plan

The key to the success of this plan is to ensure that there is some agreement across all federal agencies that defines a shared common ‘open’ data standard and identifies how deeply they are willing to push the tagging of data gathered into the collection processes for Recovery Act funding applications and into the financial reporting between the federal, state, and local agencies who are to be the recipients of the Recovery Act funds. Currently, the plan is to only go one level deep — the federal agency will require recipient reporting only from the primary agency receiving the funds.
For instance, a grant could be given from the Federal government to State A, which then gives a sub grant to City B (within State A), which hires a contractor to construct a bridge, which then hires a subcontractor to supply the concrete. In this case, State A is the prime recipient and would be required to report the sub grant to City B. However, City B does not have any specific reporting obligations — nor does the contractor or subcontractor — for the purposes of reporting to the Recovery.gov website.
In Spain, XBRL has been used right down to the municipal level for the reporting and monitoring of Local Government Budget Reporting; there’s no reason not to encourage all levels of government agencies to increase information sharing.

Kundra’s Potential Impact on XBRL

Kundra could really drive XBRL forward by insisting that all the data, right down to actual recipients, be made available as long as that data did not breach privacy and security of individuals. As accounting packages and ERP vendors like SAP are all adding XBRL export functionality to their offerings to facilitate SEC filings, it would be a natural next step to get XBRL-tagged reports all the way down to the contractor and sub-contractor levels.
Obama's team should really take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to breakdown the governmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. The Dutch and Australian governments recognized the interdependent nature of government agencies and the increased need for information-sharing via a standards-based approach and are relying heavily on the XBRL standard in their eGov efforts to give their countries an extra edge of efficiency.

Kundra should court developers by providing an open standards-based, open source tool chain, giving examples and explaining in clear language how to create applications in the same manner that Apple and Facebook have done. If built on the solid open data standard foundation laid by U.S. SEC and the XBRL consortium, this should ensure — as long as data is free and open — that applications will flourish and shine some long-awaited sunlight on government spending.

Empower the world's developers to make the Recover.gov data more useful and understandable for users rather than creating reliance on Federal government contractors to develop more websites for displaying data. Developers everywhere are eager to create meaningful applications that will connect users to financial data and solve real-world problems. Free the data, and the application developers will follow.

###

Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past nine years. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane@justsystems.com.

About JustSystems and XBRL

Along with the SEC, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation, XBRL International, and many other organizations worldwide, JustSystems has been aggressively supporting the development of the XBRL standard and integrating the interactive data format into its xfy platform. JustSystems’ software solutions work with XBRL to enable a richer way of working with and utilizing information, leveraging our technology around information search and retrieval, semantics, document management, and data integration. To learn more about how to accelerate the creation, quality, and consistency of the financial content that your organization produces and consumes today or to participate in the JustSystems beta program, please visit http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl_blog/.

XBRL and Document Management: The Perfect Storm

dmueller2001 — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:04:49 +0000

By Diane Mueller

How can you turn the U.S. SEC eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) mandate’s requirements into an opportunity when making process improvements to comply? Implement an XBRL-enhanced document management strategy as part of your internal corporate filing workflow which will both boost compliance and save money.

Strategies for Success

Document management is based on applying the principles of structured content — documents that have been chunked into meaningful component parts and tagged in a systematic fashion. In the case of the corporate financial reporting process, the structure now being applied to financial content is XBRL, the financial XML standard that promises to transform, and perhaps revolutionize, how companies create and use their financial information to meet business objectives. With the SEC mandating the use of XBRL, now is the perfect time to take advantage of these two converging industry best practices. Its standardized structure makes the application of document management systems possible for the corporate accounting sector, whereas in the past, the lack of structure had hindered the adoption of document management strategies in this domain.
Document management workflows have long been known to speed the delivery of corporate information materials, improve quality and accuracy of content across the global enterprise, increase staff efficiency with content, and reduce publishing costs. IT departments have been waiting a long time for accounting departments to open up the kimono to document management practices for the sake of improving archiving, content reuse, and data management. Going forward, successful organizations will apply document management practices to help streamline their corporate reporting processes.

Outsourcing vs. ‘In-Sourcing’ XBRL

Most CFOs and external reporting managers will probably opt for the short term fix of ‘outsourcing’ XBRL filing requirements to financial publishers. Considering the time constraints, this is a valid approach for the first ~ 500 filers who are scurrying to comply by June 2009. This ‘outsourcing’ approach puts the burden of tagging accuracy onto a third party and simply adds yet another service fee to the cost of the corporate filing process without garnering any real internal benefits to the organization. However, in some cases, the filing process must be handled internally due to the complexity of reporting requirements. Bringing the tagging effort inside, or ‘in-sourcing,’ initially offers the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the technology as well as to examine the benefits of bringing XBRL-based structured content reuse into the corporate reporting process.

The more adventurous accountants might opt to ‘in-source’ the tagging effort and assign an external reporting manager with the role of expert tagger, using one of the many XBRL-tagging tools that have cropped up in the past few months to fill the gap. However, after the first few filing cycles, it becomes apparent that both of these approaches simply increase the burden on the corporate reporting department’s limited resources and are just other versions of ‘cutting and pasting’ content from one application to another. The key to success is automation — the manual ‘tagging’ process must become an automated process that is integrated with the existing corporate reporting workflows.

The sources for the filing’s content can be connected directly to the corporate report generation workflow. Backend accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems now let users export primary financial statements to XBRL. Also, the commentary — management’s notes and discussions or footnotes — are easily stored in content management systems that now support the storage and retrieval of XBRL content. If your current accounting systems do not have an XBRL export function, there are many fully-automated XML mapping tools on the market today that can easily plug-in and create the required XBRL content. Document management systems connect all these sources of content for filing creation into a secure collaborative workflow.

Aside from the filing’s primary author and gatekeeper who is usually the External Report Manager, imagine how many ‘touches’ it takes to get a filing ready for submission to the SEC. The filing process requires review and comment from multiple parties who review, reuse, and add value to the filing document:

C-levels (CEO, CFO, COO)
Internal Audit
Legal
Corporate Communications
Investor Relations
Even your Webmaster

With an XBRL-enhanced document management system, accounting departments can compose complex filing documents from multiple data sources, monitor the status of the review cycle, check in and check out the document, refresh data from the source when necessary, track changes, and enable reuse of the content for various publishing and investor communication needs in a connected, secure, distributed manner.

XBRL: Connecting the Dots

XBRL is inherently a connective technology. As the document is assembled and circulates for review, it remains connected not just to the sources of the content (accounting systems, document archives, ERP databases) but to additional resources that enable the reviewers to make informed decisions. For example, the U.S. GAAP taxonomy comes with a reference linkbase that connects concepts to their Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) authoritative literature. So, if the reader is unsure of the definition of ‘Fair Value Assessment’ as described in the document, they will be able to click through to the most current online documentation on the subject. This same capability could connect the reader to the company’s Accounting Policies and Procedures manuals and take the reader directly to the section that explains how the company interprets the FASB ruling on the topic.

Why Now?

If you look across your organization, you will probably see many examples of document management, structured content authoring, and XML already at work today. Marketing, technical publications, and sales and training departments have long been strong proponents and avid practitioners of document management systems. Managing manuals, datasheets, parts catalogs, safety and training content, and other core publications in a structured fashion helps to substantially reduce costs. In other areas, key documents such as proposals, RFP responses, sales collateral, and contracts that directly impact revenue growth are most likely already incorporated into a document management system. Document management systems enable content reuse by presales and sales departments helping to improve win rates by allowing sales personnel to access a library of existing, proven RFP responses and standard content components to assemble custom tailored proposals and correspondence. These same principles of document management are well documented and ready to be applied to financial content.

Now is the time to apply these principles to the corporate filing process and reap the benefits across multiple departments. Content tagged and stored in a document management system can be reused securely on your investor relations website; it can be securely reviewed and revised by internal audit review, legal, and corporate communications prior to filing; and best of all, the content can be updated and reused in the next filing cycle complete with version control and change management.

Leveraging the structure inherent in XBRL documents enables you to take advantage of recent advances in content management and publishing systems to create an end-to-end corporate reporting solution that includes authoring, reviewing, publishing, translation, and management of financial information.
With resources and dollars tight, it makes good sense to take advantage of the timing of the SEC mandate to review your corporate reporting strategies. Going forward, it is key to have effective document management strategies in place for financial reporting, so take advantage of this perfect storm — the requirement to comply with the mandate and the opportunities of structured content presented by the advent of the XBRL standard — and realize a measurable impact for your organization now.

Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past nine years. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane@justsystems.com.

About JustSystems and XBRL

Along with the SEC, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation, XBRL International, and many other organizations worldwide, JustSystems has been aggressively supporting the development of the XBRL standard and integrating the interactive data format into its xfy platform. JustSystems’ software solutions work with XBRL to enable a richer way of working with and utilizing information, leveraging our technology around information search and retrieval, semantics, document management, and data integration. To learn more about how to accelerate the creation, quality, and consistency of the financial content that your organization produces and consumes today or to participate in the JustSystems beta program, please visit http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl_blog/.

Australia to host 2009 SBR Conference - Revolutionizing Financial Reporting

xbrlspy — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:21:23 +0000

Conference to be held in Sydney - 26-27 May 2009 and in Melbourne - 29 May 2009
The SBR Conference brings together national and international experts who will demonstrate what Australian business can expect from SBR, explore and discuss global financial reporting trends including open standards such as XBRL, what SBR means to business, accountants and software developers, and ultimately help you to discover what you need to do to implement SBR. Standard Business Reporting (SBR) is revolutionizing business-to-government reporting around the globe. Read more..

XBRL gets Huffed!

dmueller2001 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:17:52 +0000

Twice in one day, XBRL makes it to the mainstream online media in a big way. First at Wired.com and now with a posting by W. David Stephenson to huffingtonpost.com and now I am truly taken aback at the tsunami that has been unleashed with the SEC mandate of XBRL and Obama's push to leverage technology. Tomorrow, I have to chair yet another XBRL International consortium committee meeting - and continue to keep moving the standard forward with my colleagues from around the world on the XBRL International Steering committee - as I watch the Twitter chatter about XBRL away and try not to get distracted from the chore at hand - ensuring a that the consortium has a strong enough foundation to support all the great implementations around the world. Hopefully, all this attention will bring more resources and participants in the XBRL movement - if you are interested in getting more involved think about coming to our upcoming XBRL International Conference in Paris, France June 23-25, 2009 - don't just twitter, participate!

Recovery.gov: the First Step Toward Smart Regulation?

xbrlspy — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:52:04 +0000

by W. David Stephenson from huffingtonpost.com

The Obama Administration created Recovery.gov as a critical stimulus component, taking a "don't trust us, track us" approach to assure funds are distributed quickly and fairly and "recipients and uses of all recovery funds are transparent." It will also provide clues about how serious the Administration is about campaign promises to use the Web to transform government. Recovery.gov could be an additional reporting burden for local government agencies and companies. Or, it could be a critical step toward the "smart regulation" critics call for since the current regulatory system failed to prevent the economic collapse The Netherlands offers a model for the latter that could be easily adapted to US needs.

If eventually adopted not just by Recovery.gov but agencies in general, such an approach could dramatically reduce companies and local governments' reporting burdens; improve regulatory oversight by giving agencies simultaneous, real-time access to the same data; and, as a bonus, help improve organizations' efficiency.

The Dutch Taxonomy Project grew out of a promise to cut red tape. The voluntary program lets companies scrap traditional forms they had to file with numerous agencies, banks, and other bodies -- typically 30 or 40 -- and instead submit a single comprehensive data file which every agency can simultaneously access.

The data are what are referred to as "structured." That is, each is bracketed by "tags" -- defined by international standards groups (so they'd be equally applicable here) -- describing the data (typically, the ones applying to business, under a system of tags referred to as XBRL, are standard terms such as "net profit" or "assets."

Agencies configure their software to automatically access the relevant data. If the government chose, data could be reported on a data-in, data-out real-time basis (standard quarterly reports are remnants of an era when it took months to accumulate data and write the report. Technologically, there's no reason reporting couldn't be on a real-time basis, which might well be important given fast-changing current conditions).

Dutch agencies had to, for the first time, agree upon how various data would be defined. They went from nearly 200,000 data items required in legacy reports to only 8,000, a staggering reduction with no loss of reporting rigor.

In fact, the remaining data are more valuable to regulators because multiple agencies can now share the data simultaneously, allowing for scrutiny that might well have avoided the current debacle. In fact, Bryant University Professor Saeed Roohani said that if the Dutch approach had been in effect here, it might have avoided the crisis: "there would have been little room for mystery about types of portfolios and derived financial instruments.. Alarms would have been sounded long before reaching a crisis, and the government and stockholders could have taken preventive action."

The Dutch government estimates businesses could cut government red tape by 25%, or $515 million a year, in compliance costs with the Taxonomy Project. Imagine what the savings could be in the much larger US economy!

The FDIC now requires XBRL reporting by banks, and the SEC will require it on a phased in basis, beginning with the 500 largest publicly-owned businesses this year. If businesses must incur the costs of tagging data for these reports it would be in their best interest to urge a unified, government-wide approach to amortize the investment.

In fact, Harm Jan van Burg, who heads the Dutch project, criticized the US initiatives because they didn't also bring in the IRS and other agencies: the real benefits for companies and regulators alike come when XBRL becomes the government-wide standard.

There's still another benefit of moving to XBRL: a company or government agency tagging data for reporting can easily also give its employees access to it. For many, this would be the first time the entire workforce has real-time access to valuable, actionable information. That could dramatically improve efficiency, improve response to fast-changing conditions, and encourage collaborative problem solving.

Recovery.gov could just add a new burden for participants. Or, if it becomes the core of an ambitious "smart regulation" switch, it could cut corporate costs, improve governmental efficiency, and produce the kind of transparency the stimulus program demands.

The Revolution will be powered by data - Wired 'gets' XBRL

dmueller2001 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:50:15 +0000

posted by Diane Mueller

In an article posted today on Wired.com, Daniel Roth interviews Phil Moyer of EDGAR-Online and Charlie Hoffman and comes to the realization that XBRL is a radical and innovative technology that changes the game for finanical reporting. As he aptly notes " Even the regulators can't keep up. A Senate study in 2002 found that the SEC had managed to fully review just 16 percent of the nearly 15,000 annual reports that companies submitted in the previous fiscal year; the recently disgraced Enron hadn't been reviewed in a decade." He points out the obvious - that plowing thru a ~500 page Bear Stearns prospectus isn't for the faint hearted and certainly not conducive to a transparent flow of information to the masses. The devil is in the detail and the detail has been tagged with XBRL.

Kudos for a great article, which I encourage everyone to read - Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now! by wired.com's Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com)

Let's Use Technology to Help Value Toxic Assets

xbrlspy — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:40:41 +0000

By Paul Wilkinson from http://online.wsj.com

Perhaps the market would have preferred Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan announced Feb. 10 if it incorporated insight from Gordon Crovitz's "Time to Reinvent the Web (and Save Wall Street)" (Information Age, Feb. 9). Mr. Crovitz presciently reports how a combination of structured data and Internet technology could advance Mr. Geithner's goal to "mobilize and leverage private capital." Mr. Crovitz describes the application of "semantic Web" technology to streamline access to information about bad debts.

A semantic industry standard computer language to make investments transparent and Internet friendly already exists. Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission mandated its use for disclosure about public company financials, mutual fund risk and return, and credit ratings. A crowd-sourced project by the non-profit extensible business reporting language software (XBRL) U.S. consortium produced more than 10,000 data tags for U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles at the cost of a TARP rounding error. Software already exists to detect and explain nonstandard reporting. Finalizing data tags for the relative handful of facts required to price mortgage backed securities, other asset backed securities, and their derivatives -- at least standard derivatives -- would be easy compared to the work required to create tags for the vast universe of GAAP.

If the troubled assets are as poor as feared, those who hold them might fear the effect of industry computer standards making them transparent. It wouldn't be the first time standards hurt some incumbents. For the economy as a whole, however, prices based on accurate information and subject to competition are far superior to today's "values."

Digitizing mortgage-backed securities information should be vastly easier than it was to digitize financial disclosure for thousands of public companies with diverse business models. A few service providers handle the great majority of mortgages. Other debt issuance and maintenance is similarly concentrated. Making small-cap, asset-backed securities more comparable, transparent, marketable and potentially combinable into larger, more liquid securities would be a particular bargain if it meant fewer subsidies billed to taxpayers.

The market wants to know the specifics of Mr. Geithner's plan. XBRL could be one of them, giving the market specific data to help choose investments and discover prices.

Paul Wilkinson http://paulwilkinson.com/
San Diego

SAP Announces XBRL Publishing Support

xbrlspy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:32:10 +0000

SAP today announced it was bundling XBRL publishing support into it's product suite with the availability of SAP® BusinessObjects™ XBRL Publishing application , a new eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) application that enables customers to publish financial and business information to XBRL to enable them to meet the now mandated filing requirements of regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the U.S. and HM Revenue & Customs in the U.K. The new application allows users to automatically tag and easily transform this data into "XBRL instance documents" in a drag-and-drop environment. These "XBRL instance documents" are collections of code on which all reports of financial and business information are based, and are electronically filed with regulatory agencies that interpret the information. Features include the ability for users to easily extend standard taxonomies (an agreed-upon dictionary used by XBRL to define data tags in business reports) to help differentiate themselves from competitors by providing extra information to investors. Also, integration with Microsoft Office enables business users to incorporate supplemental information from Microsoft Word documents, like the notes and disclosures to the financial statements which are required by the SEC. "In our current economy, the way companies are being run is under even more scrutiny, and increased transparency is becoming a mandate for CFOs," said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president and general manager, Performance Optimization Applications, SAP BusinessObjects Division. "XBRL takes a first step by revolutionizing the way financial and business information is reported and disclosed. SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing helps customers to complete accurate filings quickly, supporting their efforts to comply with these new regulations. SAP continues to lead the enterprise performance management market by delivering innovation that helps our customers stay one step ahead of the game as a best-run business."

To read the press release www.sap.com/about/newsroom/press.epx

¹Gartner "XBRL Mandate on Financial Reporting Will Improve Transparency" by Michael Smith, French Caldwell, Mary Knox, Dec. 19, 2008.

Shenzhen Stock Exchange rolls out XBRL information service

xbrlspy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:32:25 +0000

The Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) has rolled out an XBRL information service platform for listed companies. The platform, optimized and upgraded on the basis of the XBRL trial application website, was launched when listed companies started to unveil their annual reports for 2008.

The platform (http://www.szse.cn or http://xbrl.cninfo.com.cn/XBRL/index.jsp), serves small and medium investors, was based on XBRL standardized data and was incorporated with functions such as display, analysis and download of listed companies’ information. The launch of the platform indicates the SZSE is heading towards a multi-layered and diversified approach for its XBRL standardized information service for listed companies. It is noted the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), a global standardized technology for financial information, was widely recognized and promoted across the world because it’s readable and comparable in computers and easy for data flow and data treatment. Currently, the platform provides the query and display of XBRL document data of the reports of all 740 companies listed in Shenzhen from 2004 to 2008.

Principals from the SZSE introduced that investors can find financial indicators in an easy and quick way through the platform’s functions like information query, analysis and comparison, graph display and file download. Comparison and display of historical financial indicators of the same company or a certain financial indicator in a number of companies are also available. Meanwhile, the application of XBRL in securities industry has a far-reaching impact in securities information disclosure. It can achieve the information share and operation of listed companies in the industry and the securities industry, pushing the standardized advancement of listed companies’ information disclosure and the securities information service industry. By closely tracking the change of business rules and timely amending the XBRL information disclosure standard for listed companies, the completeness and consistency of information disclosure documents made by listed companies can be testified.

NYC XBRL Event: What Companies and In-House Lawyers Need to Know

xbrlspy — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:27:14 +0000

Morrison & Foerster are hosting a seminar on XBRL. The event is intended for investment professionals, tax advisors, and both newly admitted and experienced attorneys.The SEC has radically changed the way that financial data is filed and utilized with the recent adoption of its interactive data rules. They will discuss what the SEC’s new approach to interactive data entails, how it has the potential to change the practices of companies, underwriters, auditors and investors, and the steps that companies and others need to take now to be ready for the rapid implementation of these rule changes. Topics covered will include: Preparation and submission of XBRL tagged disclosures; Audit and attestation implications; Internal control concerns; Integration issues;Consequences for non-compliance;Liability; Due diligence; and Other related considerations. Speakers include: David Lynn, Morrison & Foerster LLP and John Truzzolino, RR Donnelley.

The event is schedule for February 25, 2009 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM at Morrison & Foerster LLP 1290 Avenue of the Americas, 39th Floor New York, New York 10104. RSVP required to Christie Adams by telephone (212) 336-4024 or by email to: cadams@mofo.com.

Bring XBRL In-House for a True Return

xbrlspy — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:52:09 +0000

By William Gienke, Corporate Director of Technical Market Intelligence, Jefferson Wells from www.ebizq.net/topics/soa/features/10908.html

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal to require publicly held companies to file financial statements using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is coming to fruition quickly. During a recent speech, the SEC's chief accountant, Conrad Hewitt, said he expects the full commission to vote on the final rule by the end of 2008. In the SEC's current proposal, the largest companies must "tag" the main part of financial statements using XBRL for periods ending on or after Dec. 15, 2008, while all other public companies have a lag time of one to two years. At this point, XBRL compliance calls for companies to tag financial statement data with a finance-specific set of codes for filings in the initial year. In the following year, detailed footnote elements also will need to be tagged. The easiest way for public companies to implement XBRL is to outsource the tagging to their current financial statement publisher. Outsourcing XBRL, however, simply increases a company's cost of compliance, while in-sourcing enables it to meet the SEC requirements and experiment with the technology to generate additional business benefits that could pay for the compliance effort....read the full article at from www.ebizq.net/topics/soa/features/10908.html

Instead of increasing reliance on spreadsheets or expanding technology infrastructure to move data and generate reports, XBRL leverages simple Web-based technologies to build a single source of contextualized data that can automatically identify, locate and sort specific financial information. Often, client and business information is spread across various applications in the enterprise, fragmenting management's view of customer and other business-related data and forcing users to move data between multiple applications, databases and spreadsheets. According to the research firm Gartner, Inc., based in Stamford, Conn., XBRL can enhance both internal and external reporting when it is implemented beyond reporting disclosure and used to integrate financial data across all business applications and segments.

Crunching the numbers: a financial value scenario

Companies can enhance reporting without making a significant incremental investment in technology infrastructure by leveraging an in-house XBRL effort. Most stand-alone XBRL tools are relatively inexpensive. They include features that support compliance and incorporate reporting tools to provide better access to the data. XBRL is not a silver bullet, but it can augment the financial closing and reporting process and other projects, such as a move to a single-instance enterprise resource planning software system or data warehouse.

For example, take a company that generates specific client and billing data reports. As management requires new and additional information, the cost to produce these reports will likely increase. To generate the client and billing data required to increase account penetration and sales, the company plans to implement a data mart and dedicate additional resources to provide data management support. The annual cost to generate this data will double over the course of a year. If the company chooses to expand XBRL beyond the current SEC requirements, it could use the data tagging to its advantage and avoid most of the annual costs for warehousing and reporting in the future. Using contextualized data would allow the company to address the increased reporting requirements and implement enhanced reporting one year earlier than in the original plan. This use of XBRL expands the company's return on investment to cover the cost of the tool and positions the company to leverage this approach to other data elements.

Simply put, it's not cost-effective to buy a new car when all your old car needs is new tires. XBRL is a cost-effective solution to gain additional "mileage" out of existing data without implementing an additional technology infrastructure. The organization gets the data it needs to manage and improve the business while reducing the cost to manage the data.

The compliance environment of the future

Chief financial officers, directors of financial reporting and controllers all need to efficiently and effectively meet SEC reporting requirements and improve the information flow to internal stakeholders.

The SEC, through the development of the interactive data electronic applications (IDEA) tool to replace EDGAR and the 21st Century Disclosure Initiative, has signaled that form-based reporting, including the 10-K and 10-Q, will possibly disappear within a three to five-year time frame and be replaced with more rapid filing of smaller data sets. For example, the SEC could require companies to file top-line revenue within five business days after the close of a quarter with other data due at 10 days, 15 days, etc. Companies need to prepare for near-real-time releases of data.

Rapid filing will be possible once XBRL is implemented, since XBRL enables direct linking to data and eliminates the exporting and importing of data. XBRL also enables direct linking to current data, which dynamically refreshes the information. And, unlike form-based reporting in which each spreadsheet compounds the data management effort, XBRL allows data to be reused, reducing security and control risks. Tacking XBRL on the end of a spreadsheet-driven closing process does not prepare an organization for the increased speed and transparency that will likely be required in the near future.

Leveraging XBRL

This dynamic technology accomplishes more for a company than fulfilling a filing requirement. XBRL tools can provide finance staff with a centralized data source that reduces the number of spreadsheets and the time users spend developing queries and managing data. Increased user self-reliance also frees IT time to focus on other strategic initiatives.

Organizations need to be able to analyze, manipulate and act on the information in their portfolio of business systems. The implementation of XBRL in-house is a great opportunity, not only for companies to control the XBRL tagging effort, but to learn and explore the different ways this technology can provide a coherent and aggregated view of business data. Once established, employees and leadership will have the ability to make quicker and better decisions to drive the business.

About the Author

William Gienke, CPA, is the corporate director of technical market intelligence for Jefferson Wells. In this role, Bill oversees the monitoring of new and emerging legislation, regulations and trends to create relevant and timely guidance for Jefferson Wells clients and staff. He also supports the development of services that improve finance and internal audit operations. Bill can be reached at 414-319-3400 or via email at william.gienke@jeffersonwells.com.

SEMAPRO 2009 Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing issues a call for papers

xbrlspy — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:23:06 +0000

SEMAPRO 2009: The Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing to be held October 11-16, 2009 - Sliema, Malta has issued a call for papers. Submissions deadline is May 20, 2009.

Tracks topics are: Basics of semantics, Ontology fundamentals for semantic processing, Semantic technologies, Semantic Deep Web, Semantic reasoning, Semantic content searching, Hypertext and hypermedia semantic, Semantic voice-video-speech (VVS) searching, Semantic multimedia, Semantic social media, Semantic networking, Domain-oriented semantic applications, Economics and governance of semantics technologies, and Semantic applications/platforms/tools. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, published by IEEE CPS, posted in IEEE Digital Library, and indexed with the major indexes; Extended versions of selected papers will be published in IARIA Journals: http://www.iariajournals.org

Technically Co-sponsored by the IEEE Malta Section and IARIA, www.iaria.org . For more information, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/CfPSEMAPRO09.html

Altova brings XBRL to mainstream for XML Developers

dmueller2001 — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:57:26 +0000

by Diane Mueller

XML Developers are surely rejoicing with Altova's recent announcement of XBRL support. By adding XBRL functionality into Altova's ever popular suite of development tools of XMLSpy, Mapforce and StyleVision, an army of XML developers will hopefully now be unleashed and eased into developing XBRL-aware applications without having to leave the comfort of their beloved XML tools. This announcement should help spur further mainstreaming of the XBRL standard. The timing is right with the US SEC Mandate fast approaching and numerous public companies looking for help to create re-usable corporate filings workflows.

Altova should find a number of eager early adopters of their Mapforce product which will enable developers to easily design and implement automation into document creation workflows. With Mapforce's graphically mapping capabilities, developers will be able to connect backend data from accounting systems and databases to the XBRL format. With multiple automation options and royalty-free code generation in MapForce enable the creation of XBRL mappings that can be created once and re-used as needed for quarterly or annual reporting.

The ever-popular XMLSpy 2009 now includes its own validation engine that supports the validation of XBRL instance documents created based on XBRL 2.1 and XBRL Dimensions 1.0. This allows users to view and analyze XBRL taxonomies as well as validate XBRL instance documents against taxonomies. XMLSpy 2009 also includes an XBRL taxonomy editor which uses the same editing paradigm as the popular XMLSpy graphical XML schema editor, providing a visual representation of XBRL taxonomies, with intelligent views and entry-helpers for editing and extending them.

It's always nice to have another entrant into the XBRL validation space and it's especially nice to see Altova entering the XBRL game bringing along another whole community of XML developers to the marketplace. I can't wait to see the results of all these newly enable XMLSpies! Welcome aboard.

Also worth noting: XBRL validation is available in AltovaXML 2009 providing developers with a royalty-free XBRL validator for use in their applications.

To see the full news release: www.altova.com/MissionKitv2009_XBRLOverview_020509.html

Long Live XBRL!

xbrlspy — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:12:11 +0000

by Conor O’Kelly from http://hitachidatainteractive.com

It’s fabled that The King is dead! Long live the King! was first proclaimed in France in 1422, when Charles VII ascended to the throne upon the death of his father Charles VI. It’s rumored that XBRL is dead! Long live XBRL! was first declared in Florida in 2009, as the changing of the XBRL International Guard took place in an uncharacteristically chilly Miami in January. But the serious tone of the XBRL International Steering Committee meeting was unequivocal: XBRL is no longer a spectator sport. The gears have shifted from “neutral” to “drive,” and even a passing visit to the renowned Miami Ink Tattoo Studio on South Beach failed to mask the businesslike tone of this ISC meeting. What is different about 2009 is that this is the year when a number of heavyweight regulator projects move from concept, pilot, or voluntary filing into live production with mandated filing.

XBRL Initiatives Accelerate
Pressure mounts in all geographic regions for transparency and adequacy of controls in banking supervision. Only mere months after XBRL was touted as the solution to Enron, the global banking sector is coming under pressure to produce solutions for transparency and risk management woes. The Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) continues its flagship XBRL FINREP/COREP IFRS/Basel II program, now accompanied by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) project, as well as the increasing possibility of similar adoption in Latin America (led by Argentina, Brazil, and Chile). The US-based FDIC quarterly call reports program continues as well.

By early January, the influential IBM Global Data Governance Council called for submissions from banks, financial institutions, corporations, vendors, and regulators to create a standards-based approach to risk reporting in response to an industry-wide need for standardized risk data. The significance of Big Blue entering the debate wasn’t lost on any of the commentators mindful of its potential to influence global risk management, or the ERP vendors who have been waiting for demand to reach critical mass before also entering the fray.

The stage is now set for global enterprise XBRL applications to deploy in 2009 alongside the desktop drag-and-tag toolsets that have become a familiar client-side companion of data taggers around the world. Mandatory adoption along with the appropriate infrastructure investment will characterize XBRL adoption this year.

Accept or not the criticism of US SEC Chairman Cox for being too slow in reacting to the Madoff scandal and the financial meltdown, he did champion the protection of the individual investor by mandating that all US SEC publicly quoted companies file in XBRL by 2011. Equally important, mutual funds (with $10 trillion in assets) along with credit rating agencies are mandated in 2009 to file financials in XBRL. In limited circumstances, they will also publish these XBRL statements on their company Web sites alongside their traditional paper-based financials.

Progress in Asia and Europe
In Asia, the influential Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) takes its place at the XBRL International Steering Committee table as a significant regional influencer, on the heels of their mandatory filing program for publicly quoted Chinese companies. Equally notable is Singapore’s Accounting & Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA): they have a regional mandatory filing program, have joined as a direct participant in XII, and will likely drive regional adoption in the Southeast Asia region.

The fledgling XBRL India jurisdiction will increasingly invigorate the near Asia market with the promise of offshore outsourcing of data tagging and the vibrant support for local Basel II-based banking supervision, led by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and other local regulators.

The work programs of XBRL Europe, the consortium of EU jurisdictions formed in 2008, continue to gather pace. The European Federation of Accounts (FEE) has mobilized a technical taskforce to examine the topic, and the equally influential Global Accounting Alliance, comprising nine of the world’s leading accounting institutions, has thrown the topic open for discussion.

Inevitably, the traditional chummy, evangelical XBRLfests are now a thing of the past. In June, the 19th XBRL International Conference returns to Paris, the birthplace of Charles VI, and it is focused on exploring real practicalities of global and region-wide government and regulation projects. Attendees are expected to bring real solutions to real problems. Spectators beware — your day has passed. Le XBRL est mort, Vive le XBRL!

Conor O’Kelly is a member of the International Steering Committee (ISC) of XBRL International and Chair of the Jurisdiction Department for 2009. He has ten years’ background in global IT managed services, global project management, and strategic IT business planning with Hewlett-Packard and Ericsson. Mr. O’Kelly is a Chartered Accountant with an MSc in IT Management and a past member of the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland.

from http://hitachidatainteractive.com/2009/02/11/long-live-xbrl/

XBRL: An attempt to empower amateur analysts?

dmueller2001 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:00:00 +0000

By Diane Mueller

In an article on Law360.com entitled "XBRL Filings To Become Mandatory This June", the author, Jesse Greenspan takes an interesting point of view in saying that the US Securities and Exchange Commission's XBRL initiatives were an attempt to empower amateur analysts. It's the first time I've ever heard XBRL described in this manner which at first glance might seems to minimize the impact that XBRL is expected to have across the entire Financial Reporting Supply chain. It would be nice to think that the SEC would spend 59 million dollars to modernize the EDGAR filing system just so amateur analysts could have a field day and uncover the next bubble - but in reality, the SEC is also being self-serving as there is no way that the current system could continue in place without such an XBRL-enhanced modernization effort.

A nice side effect of the SEC's XBRL initiatives is, indeed, empowerment of individual investors and analysts to freely access high quality tagged data that will now be machine-readable. This should lower the cost and barriers for so-called amateur analysts to come up with their own algorithms and financial models - perhaps landing them on "the cover of Fortune magazine" - as the article goes on to quote a parther at a respected law firm. To read the entire Law360 article, click here: XBRL Filings To Become Mandatory This June

The Origins of XBRL

xbrlspy — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:51:00 +0000

The reporting language SEC chairman Christopher Cox calls ‘a quantum leap over existing technologies’ was conceived by a rebel accountant: Charlie Hoffman . He first had the idea in 1998 to treat financial information not as a block of text, but discrete bits of data to be tagged. Hoffman, working in Tacoma, Washington, had an assignment from a client to transfer product pricing information from its accounting system to the internet automatically. It dawned on him that XML could be adapted to do the job. Hoffman taught a few software experts how to read a balance sheet, and together they had a version of XBRL working within three months. Then he had to bring the rest of the financial reporting world along with him. Key figures, including Mike Willis of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Mike Schnitzer, then of EDGAR Online and now at Microsoft, saw the appeal quickly, but there were still frustrations. ‘The early days of moving XBRL from the US to the global stage were fraught with typical start-up-style growing pains: heated debates, disagreements and too many proverbial cooks in the kitchen,’ recalls Rob Blake, senior director for interactive services at Bowne. Hoffman, now director of innovative solutions with UBmatrix, an XBRL service provider, had two hurdles to overcome. The first was the general conservatism of accountants, Blake says. The other was that XML itself ‘was brand new and was still being figured out by companies and the marketplace,’ he adds. Still, Hoffman was a good proselytizer. ‘He reached out to those he knew could help him get in front of the right people at major accounting firms and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, to try to get them to understand the idea,’ says Blake. ‘By no means was it a walk in the park – his vision was truly a global one.’

Excerpted from the article http://www.thecrossbordergroup.com/pages/2112/XBRL+Unlocked.stm?article_id=13193

Final SEC Ruling on XBRL released

xbrlspy — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:18:38 +0000

The Securities and Exchange Commission released the final ruling which mandates XBRL. This is a pivotal moment for the financial industry. This bold step taken by the SEC will bring much needed transparency to the U.S. capital markets. Here's a synopsis of the key points:

The final rule stated that the 500 largest filers must start furnishing their financial statements in XBRL with their second quarter report for 2009. In 2010, the ruling will apply to all accelerated filers (approximately 1,800 firms) and in the following year to all public companies (approximately 12,000).
For the first year of filing, a company will have to submit XBRL tagged data from the primary financial statements (income statement, statement of cash flows, balance sheet and shareholder's equity) along with block tagging of footnotes. In the second year of filing, tagging of footnotes will have to be done in a detailed manner.
The first XBRL filing a company produces can be submitted up to 30 days after their EDGAR filing. For all subsequent filings, the XBRL information must be furnished concurrently with the EDGAR document. In addition, companies must also concurrently post their XBRL filing on their own web sites.

The mandate of XBRL by the SEC is as important to today's capital markets as the 1934 Act has been to generations of investors. XBRL can help bring financial reporting into a more transparent digital age. XBRL makes data machine readable and fully traceable. XBRL is a global open standard that can handle multiple variations of language or currency. Click here to read the entire ruling

XBRL Becomes Mandatory - This Should Be Interesting

xbrlspy — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:17:39 +0000

By Kurt Cagle February 9, 2009 from XML.com

The announcement came quietly, a briefly worded memo from the SEC in December that as of the the third fiscal quarter of 2009 (starting in June), companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earnings using the Extensible Business Markup Language, or XBRL. Other companies would be required to follow suit according to whether they use GAAP (which have a one year grace period) or IFRP (starting 2011).

The XBRL so provided would be data-centric rather than document-centric, and would be provided in addition to format text submissions of tax filings rather than replacing them. Additionally, each company would be required to host their XBRL enabled filings on their websites for a period of one year. The XBRL so submitted is required but currently has no liability save that associated with outright fraud, though this liability will be phased out in stages by 2014.

From the IT perspective, the formal adoption of XBRL as a mandatory requirement is likely to have a number of implications, not least of which being a suddenly high demand for XML skilled people in general, and XBRL people in particular, as well as a boon for XBRL service providers and tools vendors. As with the OOXML/ODF controversy of 2007, it is very likely that 2009 will be a banner year for XML technologies in general, as two of the key issues that are highly visible this year - financial transparency within corporations and the streamlining of health care, both involve rich XML standards - XBRL for financial reporting, HL7 v3 for electronic health records.

Additionally, it is very likely that as companies began incorporating such standards into their financial and reporting systems, this will also open up the possibility of incorporating XML into other aspects of an organization's communication channels, such as the use of HR-XML standards for handling personnel management, pay and performance tracking.

Unfortunately, it is also likely that such transparency will prove harder to achieve than simply establishing XBRL as a standard. What has become evident in the last several weeks is that there is a serious tug of war going on between the banks (who would be among the first companies to have to adopt XBRL) and the Federal government in terms of what exactly such transparency should entail.

Banks and financial institutions have always existed under a certain shroud of secrecy concerning their internal holdings, though this process has been exacerbated since the late 1990s. So long as a bank could control what was or was not on its balance sheets, it could maintain the facade that it had the resources necessary to make loans, sell financial investment vehicles, and act as brokers for mergers and acquisitions. It could also engage in investments into higher return (and riskier) investments such as hedge funds with impunity, because these processes could be carried "off the books", meaning that investors and regulatory agencies generally didn't see them. Finally, this also made it possible for such organizations to claim specific values for their collateral properties, without actually having to test these against the market.

The credit contraction that has emerged as a consequence of those policies have suddenly made knowing the actual state of such banks a much more meaningful issue for an incoming batch of (considerably younger and more eager) regulators as well as for investors who have watched their investments wiped out. The ugly (and increasingly self-evident) secret is that many of the largest financial institutions in the US (and throughout the rest of the world) are effectively insolvent - if they had to declare their assets based upon existing market values, megabanks such as Citigroup or Bank of America would not have enough capital on hand to even make a dent in their existing obligations, let alone make any new loans.

In the early 1980s, Paul Volcker, then the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, suspended the requirements for banks above a certain size to actually declare their mark their assets to current market values in the wake of the devastating stagflationary era of the late 1970s. In essence, this blind eye approach helped banks to strengthen their capital positions and bought them time as the economy recovered.

There are some indications that Tim Geithner, the current Treasury secretary and a protege of Volcker's, is trying to perform the same kind of actions with the current banks, in the hope that within a couple of years (and with the continued investment of money from the TARP program into bank balance sheets) that the current crop of banks will also be able to recover from their mistakes and be in a strong enough position to start functioning "normally" again.

In the military, it is considered almost an axiom that generals tend to fight the last war they knew, rather than the one they face now. It's pretty much inevitable, when you think about it - wars of a large enough scope tend thankfully to be rare events, and this means that in the interim you have to make assumptions (create a model - funny how that process keeps cropping up) based upon your last available inputs. The good generals are the ones who recognize this, and who are able to recognize when the last war's solutions aren't relevant to this war's problems - but this is a learning experience.

This is the situation that the government faces today. This systemic level of collapse has not occurred since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the solutions proposed all tend to reflect the modeling of the economy based upon past crises. These are the past wars in the economy that the "generals" are now fighting, and it is almost certain that many, if not most, of the solutions being proposed now will have either a marginal or a negative effect upon the economy moving forward.

The most immediate hope is to protect the banks, stem the rapid rise in unemployment, and invest heavily in a Keynesian bout of stimulus spending, which not surprisingly includes many representatitives' favorite pet projects, in order to get money back into the hands of people. I suspect that none of these things will happen, at least not in the short term.

The "convenient fiction" that the banks actually have assets has been unravelling for a while now, to the extent that it actually costs more for a Starbucks latte than it does for a share of Bank of America. Either Citigroup or BofA will almost certainly "fail" within the next few months, and quite possibly both will. A bank is all about trust - once trust has been lost, a bank has about as much chance of regaining that trust from its customers as a man does when caught by his wife in flagrante with three prostitutes and a gerbil.

Once this happens, any pretense that things are "under control" will have been lost. This is made even worse by the pressure now being placed on banks as other businesses fail, taking with them investments, commercial property loans and causing another cascade of hedge fund aftershocks. It will also likely drag with it smaller banks that may be financially sound, but that had exposure to these banking monoliths (and relied upon investors that are increasingly tapped out).

Yet it's worth putting all of this into perspective. We're in a recession. Recessions are a normal -- and necessary -- part of the business cycle. During the growth phase of the economic cycle, investors make "bets" that a given business will succeed. Some will. Many won't. The ones that don't can often survive in good times even with a less than stellar business model because there are avenues to keep the business afloat until it either catches or fails completely.

Yet eventually, you end up with too much capacity, too many hi-def plasma screen TVs or Starbucks coffeeshops. The recessionary phase performs liquidation - it releases capital resources that were tied up in these money-losing ventures and reduces inventories until demand meets supply once again.

It is, however, a very unpleasant phase for many - investors lose money, perhaps lots of money, as their bets fail, workers lose their jobs, governments face cutbacks as tax revenues drop, banks lose money as the velocity of money slows, expectations get scaled back. This is such an unpleasant scenario that governments and banks will do their level best to avoid recessions, and increasingly have done so by trying to make recessions short and shallow.

The 2001-2003 Recession is a case in point - while extraordinarily hard on tech, it served to remove a lot of the mal-investment that had taken place in the tech sector (remember the Pets.com sock puppet?), reset expectations, and overall actually served to make the sector more sane, putting it on much firmer footing than many other industries. It would have likely spread, given the imbalances that existed then, if the Fed hadn't at the time injected an extraordinary amount of credit into the market. This last recession, if it had been left to follow its course, would have probably bottomed out a few months after it actually did, and by 2005, the economy would probably have been growing at a pretty dramatic clip without this.

In goosing the markets, however, with cheap credit, the Fed stopped a healthy (and necessary) recession before it could do its work. The malinvestment outside of the tech sector remained, and was then compounded by the movement of that credit into the mortgage and capital real-estate markets, in essence turning home owners into speculators (always a bad idea).

Recessions are systemic events - they occur because large term pressures build up in the system, and the impedence, or back pressure, builds up accordingly. Eventually, the back-pressures reach a tipping point, and the larger the pressure, the more dramatic the collapse of the system to a new point of stable equilibrium, and the less effect traditional measures have in stopping this.

This means that companies and organizations that were only marginally successful during the growth phase (or those that took on too much systemic risk, as many banks did) will fail. It means that unemployment will continue to rise over the next year, possibly to more than 10% - and as painful as it is to those put out of work, those jobs should be lost. It means that investors who were most exposed to the riskiest investments should lose their shirts, leaving them poorer but wiser.

In other words, the best action to take at this stage is to let the recession happen, let the excesses work their way out of the system, encourage people to build up savings in order to fuel the next boom and give people the incentive to start up meaningful businesses rather than let uncompetitive dinosaurs continue to lay waste to the business landscape.

For Congress (and Mr. Obama), this requires doing some politically unpalatable things. Start saying no to bailouts, especially to the banks, but perhaps to any industry that has grown to the level that its CEOs each show up on their own private jets to speak to Congress. Backstop human services, so that the most vulnerable don't bear too much of the brunt, but other than that let natural market forces do what they do best (even if the capitalists who kept protesting government intervention in the free markets in the last decade while getting progressively wealthier are now crying for protection from those very same free markets).

Let transparency become more than a convenient buzzword - if a bank doesn't have enough solvent capital to survive in this market, then it should fail. If businesses have become "too big to fail" then they have also become too dangerous to society at large and should be broken up into more competitive organizations. Yet none of this is going to happen so long as businesses, financial or otherwise, can continue to use loopholes in GAAP accounting to hide their weaknesses. None of this is going to happen so long as government continues as a series of quid pro quos done in smoke-filled rooms.

Finally, none of this is going to happen if Congress acts for the sake of getting re-elected, rather than solving very real problems. Congress has been given a golden opportunity to lay the groundwork of the next major economic revolution, and while some aspects of the status package are encouraging, the inevitable give and take of politics may also end up diluting the impact of the bill considerable, especially given the Senate version (which is much more focused on status quo parties).

It's perhaps disingenuous to call this a stimulus bill - most of the impact from the legislation will not effectively come into play until 2010 at the earliest, which is angering many on both sides of the political aisle, but in many ways this is perhaps wisest - the recession now has a momentum that's probably unstoppable at this stage and as such will continue until a new equilibrium is reached. Now is the time to be laying groundwork for these new initiatives so that the legal structures will be in place in order to build more effectively on it when the avalanche finally does stop.

Yet because of this, Congress should also not bow to pressure to skimp in certain areas (such as the defunding of many health and science programs, among other things) because they are perceived as not directly contributing to jobs. Science in particular tends to be a long term investment, one that may not necessarily provide immediate returns, but that, once in place, will eventually produce yields far beyond its initial investment.

Ultimately, this is what Congress should be considering - moving away from the opaque short-term manipulation of the market for the benefit of a few to a transparent, long-term shaping of the economy overall for the benefit of all. Such a strategy isn't always popular, especially to those who benefit most from the status quo, but the role of government should be to protect the interests of everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

Kurt Cagle is Online Editor for O'Reilly Media and managing editor for XML Today. You can subscribe to his O'Reilly blogs or follow him on Twitter.

Time to Reinvent the Web (and Save Wall Street)

xbrlspy — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:19:41 +0000

A tech antidote to our current pessimism.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

The essence of capitalism, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter warned, is "creative destruction" that undermines economic structures, then replaces them with better ones. Today we know all about destruction. We could use a happy dose of the creative element.

Welcome to TED. Founded 25 years ago, the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference is the place for glimpses into the future. The early version of a Mac personal computer was unveiled at TED, now attended by more than 1,000 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and Hollywood celebrities. Last week's conference was an antidote to recessionary pessimism. It was also a reminder that other industries, especially Wall Street, need to embrace the technologist ethos of constant creativity and innovation.

The inventor of the World Wide Web could be forgiven for resting on his laurels, but instead Tim Berners-Lee told the audience that it's already time to reimagine the Web. As a young computer scientist in 1989, he sent his manager a memo outlining the idea of hypertext and how it could help researchers share information. His manager scribbled "vague but exciting" and gave him the time to develop the idea.

Mr. Berners-Lee now advocates what he calls "linked data," to go beyond today's hypertext and make readily accessible digital information stored in any format from any source. There's a huge amount of data now in various digital formats, but it's hard to find new relationships or correlations. He said the Web could be reorganized so that well-tagged tables of structured information can easily be linked to others. For example, scientists could link data about proteins and genomics to tackle Alzheimer's. Mr. Berners-Lee led the TED crowd in a chant of "Raw data, now!"

Asked about the benefits of what's called the semantic Web, compared with today's less sophisticated Web, Mr. Berners-Lee told me "It's . . . as hard to explain as my original idea for the Web." The raw-data revolution would be "a paradigm shift as important as the Web was at its time. . . . imagine if you could access all the data from previously unconnected sources and ask any question of the data that you like." People in different disciplines could access the same information from different vantage points. "We'd quickly find new relationships among data and new answers to problems in ways we haven't been able to imagine."

For a few days at TED, this kind of rethinking makes the credit bubble look like a pebble along the path of progress. Futurist Ray Kurzweil reminded the group that exponential growth in the power of computers is just the latest example of more than a century of exponential growth in communication and information technologies, beginning with electromechanical power and continuing through vacuum tubes and transistors. This growth has occurred "through all economies, including the Depression." He announced that Google and NASA agreed to fund his new Singularity University, named for his prediction that computers will soon match humans in key areas of intelligence.

Maybe computers are already smarter than people. The financial engineers whose models failed to capture key risks could take a page from Silicon Valley engineers, who understand that innovation requires sound data applied through trial and error.

Several presenters at TED described creative efforts to perfect robots, which now disarm explosives in Iraq and help surgeons reduce the invasiveness of operations. A researcher displayed a lifelike bust of Albert Einstein, eerily capable of dozens of facial expressions. For several years, Boston Dynamics has been developing a quadruped robot for the U.S. military called BigDog, which now almost perfectly emulates canine walk and could be used as a pack mule. By the 10th generation, the product should be great.

The pressure on financial engineers, in contrast, has been to compete to get new products out the door quickly, with their firms showing little patience for multiyear research and development. It's too bad these new products could not be labeled "beta," as technologists do when they need to warn that products are not fully tested and still need work.

Mr. Berners-Lee said his new approach could revolutionize financial markets, which are in dire need of better access to information. The continued lack of transparency about which banks own how much bad debt still paralyzes the system.

A challenge worthy even of the inventor of the Web is to reorganize information more creatively to help Wall Street better understand the data that drive markets up and down. The fastest way to economic recovery just might be a financial system rebuilt along the innovative lines of today's digital technology.

from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413741814261521.html

Key Performance Indicators: A step in the direction of business reporting transparency

xbrlspy — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:21:43 +0000

by Edward E. Nusbaum, CEO, Grant Thornton LLP

Only 22 percent of Americans have faith in the financial system, according to a recently launched financial trust index. (“Wall Street Excess: Looting Stars,” The Economist, Jan. 31, 2009) This widespread mistrust is shameful . . . and yet it’s easy to understand. Since the year 2000, public trust and confidence in not only the financial system, but also financial reporting, has been rocked by catastrophic business failures, financial reporting restatements, the dot-com bubble, corporate scandals and, now, the global credit crisis.

Renewed calls for new laws and tighter regulations have begun. However, no regulation, rule, law, standard or principle alone can protect investors and maintain the integrity of the markets. What really matters is people doing the right thing and holding themselves accountable for the consequences of their actions. From this universal truth, we can begin to improve business reporting by making it more transparent.

Providing key performance indicators (KPIs) is a place to start. KPIs are measures used to evaluate progress made toward an objective. The most effective KPIs are not only leading indicators of performance, but also provide insights into intangible factors such as business opportunities, risks, strategies and plans. Companies should disclose the KPIs used to run the business, and analysts should identify the KPIs they need to make informed investment decisions.

KPIs — which differ based on industry — on relevant factors such as innovation, people and customer loyalty, as well as market share and results of R&D, will enable investors to assess more effectively the quality, sustainability and variability of a company’s cash flows and earnings. Such performance indicators, however, are not regularly found in existing corporate annual reports.

I was honored to serve on the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting (CIFiR). CIFiR’s August 2008 report included a number of recommendations for improving financial reporting. One of those recommendations urged the SEC to “encourage private sector dialogue, involving preparers, investors (including analysts), and other interested industry participants, such as consortia that have long supported KPI-like concepts, to generate understandable, consistent, relevant and comparable KPIs.” It is time for the business community to bring this recommendation to life for the greater good of the capital markets.

Today’s credit and financial crisis is a painful reminder that the current financial reporting model fails to provide the information investors need to understand business risks and performance. This information gap requires a fundamental rethinking of the information that corporations should be disclosing to keep investors properly informed about corporate financial prospects.

U.S. CFOs agree that the financial reporting system needs overhaul, according to a recent Grant Thornton survey. Among nearly 700 participating U.S. CFOs and senior controllers, seven of 10 say that financial reporting is too complex to be understood by investors. Eight of 10 support supplementing financial statements with nonfinancial measures that provide more relevant information about their respective organizations and value drivers.

To make business reporting more transparent, relevant, accessible and reliable, Grant Thornton has taken a leadership role in U.S. and international initiatives such as the World Intellectual Capital Initiative (WICI), Enhanced Business Reporting and Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

Every participant in the equity and credit markets not only has a stake in improving the quality and transparency of business reporting, but also shares the responsibility to rebuild pubic trust and confidence. Will you step forward and accept the challenge of creating the future of business reporting?

About Grant Thornton
The people in the independent firms of Grant Thornton International Ltd provide personalized attention and the highest quality service to public and private clients in more than 100 countries. Grant Thornton LLP is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International Ltd, one of the six global audit, tax and advisory organizations. In the U.S., visit Grant Thornton LLP at www.grantthornton.com.

SEC Issues Final Rules on Interactive Data

xbrlspy — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:16:03 +0000

The SEC released its final rules on Interactive Data to Improve Financial Reporting. Here is the summary:

We are adopting rules requiring companies to provide financial statement information in a form that is intended to improve its usefulness to investors. In this format, financial statement information could be downloaded directly into spreadsheets, analyzed in a variety of ways using commercial off-the-shelf software, and used within investment models in other software formats. The rules will apply to public companies and foreign private issuers that prepare their financial statements in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (U.S. GAAP), and foreign private issuers that prepare their financial statements using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Companies will provide their financial statements to the Commission and on their corporate Web sites in interactive data format using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The interactive data will be provided as an exhibit to periodic and current reports and registration statements, as well as to transition reports for a change in fiscal year. The new rules are intended not only to make financial information easier for investors to analyze, but also to assist in automating regulatory filings and business information processing. Interactive data has the potential to increase the speed, accuracy and usability of financial disclosure, and eventually reduce costs.

XBRL International Inc. announces 2009 Steering Committee election results

xbrlspy — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:58:07 +0000

New York, 30 January, 2009 – XBRL International Inc. (XII) announced today that Mike Willis, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, has been ratified as the new Chair of the International Steering Committee (ISC) effective 16 January 2009. During its January meeting in Miami, Florida, the International Steering Committee also ratified Diane Mueller, Vice President, XBRL Development,, JustSystems and founder of XBRLSpy, as 1st Vice Chair representing Jurisdictions, Liv Watson, Board Member, IRIS India, as 2nd Vice Chair representing At Large members, and Arleen Thomas, Senior VP - AICPA, as Treasurer for the ISC. In addition, we are pleased to announce the election of 4 new At-Large members to the ISC: David Van den Ende, Deloitte Netherlands, Ralf Frank, DVFA Germany, Josef Macdonald, Ernst & Young UK, and Michal Piechoki, BR-AG Poland.

“The organization is quite pleased by the quality of the candidates that were nominated during this election process. With these additions to the International Steering Committee we are poised to address the growing market demands resulting from global XBRL adoption.” states CEO Anthony Fragnito. Incoming ISC Chair Mike Willis, “The ISC is excited to address the opportunities and challenges arising from the accelerating market adoption of XBRL around the world. The diversity of the individuals elected is reflective of the growing international presence and enabling process implications provided by the XBRL standard." Please refer to www.xbrl.org for a complete listing of the ISC leadership positions.

Data-Tagging: New Push for a Global Standard

xbrlspy — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:00:00 +0000

International rulemakers release a "nearly" final version of their XBRL tool, and many see it as a major step toward IFRS.
Marie Leone and Alix Stuart, CFO.com | US
January 12, 2009

The closest thing the global accounting community has to the Rosetta Stone — the international financial reporting standards taxonomy for 2009 — was released on Monday for public comment by the International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation. It is the centerpiece of the foundation's XBRL (extensible business reporting language) project, which when completed should make reporting financial results easier, more accurate, and more easily compared — a big benefit for investors and analysts.

The so-called IFRS Taxonomy 2009 is a translation of the international standards — as they were issued on Dec. 31, 2008 — into XBRL, the Internet data-tagging language that is being touted by the IASC Foundation as "rapidly becoming the format of choice for electronic filing of financial information." Essentially, the Internet-based language is a dictionary of data tags that explains each tagged number and how it should be treated under IFRS.

For instance, no matter where revenue numbers appear in financial statements, they will be identified or "tagged" as revenue which makes searching for an individual or aggregate number relatively simple compared to manually combing through corporate financial statements or scrolling through spreadsheet documents.

Perhaps more important from a global perspective, some observers believe the adoption of XBRL will help move companies toward IFRS. Indeed, many experts believe that the tagging language makes it easier for companies to migrate from local GAAPs to IFRS. Both U.S. and international accounting rulemakers have been working since 2002 to converge local GAAPs with IFRS in an effort to produce one set of global standards. Anything seen as moving that effort forward is viewed as strenthening and adding transparency to financial reporting, in general.

One proponent, Kurt Ramin, chairman emeritus of XBRL International, pointed out in an article that he wrote last year for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, that the IASC Foundation was "involved early-on in building a taxonomy to drive global adoption of both IFRS and XBRL." Meanwhile, a few corporate accounting managers who have led their companies in the switch to IFRS say that XBRL made the transition easier.

Witness global outsourcer Infosys, one of the 17 companies that signed up for a Securities and Exchange Commission pilot program in 2005 to try out XBRL. In 2005, the company reported in U.S. GAAP, but by last year, Infosys was reporting using IFRS and tagging the data.

Gargi Ray, manager of technical accounting for global outsourcer Infosys, tells CFO.com that XBRL aligns data with broad concepts, such as revenue, which seems to have helped the conversion to IFRS. Aligning accounting concepts that match up with IFRS concepts makes the migration to the international standards relatively easy compared to migrating spreadsheet-based financial statements, opines Ray.

In addition, Ray reported that 82 percent of last year's financial results were tagged using XBRL without having to create new tagging elements to account for items associated with new accounting rules or that were peculiar to Infosys. Ray calls that tagging effort "pretty good for the first time [using the 2008 taxonomy]."

As for the American push for XBRL, a mandate to file financial results using an interactive format has been looming for so long that most CFOs have long since tuned it out. Only about half claimed to be familiar with XBRL in a September survey by Grant Thornton, and a whopping 90 percent reported no plans to use it. And while outgoing SEC chairman Christopher Cox has been one of XBRL's biggest champions, the process of making the language mandatory for financial reports has taken a tortuously slow path, culminating in a rule that hung suspended in proposal state for more than six months last year.

Some speculation remains about whether the SEC will adopt parts or all of the IFRS version of the taxonomy, but the SEC has not returned phone calls seeking comment on that issue. Assuming that the commission finalizes the rule as written before Cox leaves office office, companies with market caps of $5 billion and above would have to immediatley start tagging 2008 year-end financials with XBRL code and be able to handle the task of coding footnotes in detail for 2009 10-Ks.

The IFRS 2009 taxonomy, which can be found on the IASB website, will be out for public comment until March 12, with a final version is expected out in early April.

How Semantic Tools Can Aid Financial Reports

xbrlspy — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:00:00 +0000

By Jennifer Zaino from SemanticWeb.com

Experts at the W3C are exploring the potential for applying the Semantic Web to financial data, especially XBRL, the extensible business reporting language.
Delivering precise semantics to financial reports is near and dear to the heart of Dave Raggett, a W3C fellow sponsored by Justsystems to explore the potential for applying the Semantic Web to financial data, especially XBRL (extensible business reporting language). If there was ever a time to fulfill a mission, it's this mission, and it's now.

The end result would be to make it easier to deliver greater transparency into corporate financial operations. The XBRL markup standard for financial reports -- born before semantic web standards crystallized -- helps, by avoiding re-keying of data for financial analysis, which inevitably introduces errors and costs. And it's still difficult to combine financial data from company reports with other sources of data.

"XBRL uses XML in a fairly complicated way, so it's not so easy to manipulate data expressed in XBRL directly," says Raggett. Typically you must import data and convert it to some other format, and "rather than having to create your own proprietary solution to that, it's much better to take advantage of the investment that's gone into the semantic web."

Raggett points to the trend of greater transparency in the way in which businesses operate, and he expects that this will continue, particularly given the recent troubles the world has seen in the financial markets. Government regulators, such as the SEC here, and other bodies around the world, have sought and are likely to seek even more accountability, including the use of the XBRL format in financial submissions, so Raggett expects to see a lot more data in the form of XBRL in a few years' time.

How the semantic web technologies play into this is in their ability to potentially create an "open market" for people to add value in the processing of XBRL data translated into RDF format, Raggett says. He notes the potential to apply this not just to annual or quarterly reports for regulatory and investor review, but for related kinds of markup on work that represents corporate risk and other factors.

"Within companies the potential in the long run for people is to use XBRL and semantic web

technologies to make their companies more open, and much easier to see what is going on within the company so you can manage the company better," he says.

Raggett is working on an open source XBRL import tool to translate XBRL data into RDF. He also is in the process of setting up an interest group at the W3C on XBRL and the application of the semantic web to financial data, which he hopes to come together in the early part of the year. He sees potential for XBRL International and the W3C standards bodies to potentially benefit from feedback that could lead to complementary extensions or improvements to XBRL and semantic web standards. And from his conversations, businesses are eager to see developments in this area.

"I think that in order for companies to comply with an increasingly complex regulatory environment, they are going to find it necessary, perhaps, to evolve how they handle financial data, so XBRL and the semantic web has potential to help with that," he says. "The contacts I've had [with business people] all show strong interest in this."

Things are still very early stage, and Raggett sees challenges as well as opportunities ahead. Take scalability, for instance. "When it comes to scaling, if you want to run analytics or projections across companies and markets, obviously there is a large amount of data involved, so the challenge is to make it work quickly," says Raggett.

"Think about web search engines today -- you get raw results back fast. Ideally it's the same with financial data, so there are challenges in how to make it happen. In the semantic web people are building larger and larger triple stores, but the issue of how to make this scale is an interesting one. There is lots of potential in cloud computing to address those issues."

Canadian move to single National Securities Regulator key to restoring Investor Confidence

dmueller2001 — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:56:23 +0000

by Diane Mueller

Last week's recommendation from the Expert Panel on Securities Regulation regarding the formation of a national securities regulator for Canada has been a long time coming. The Expert Panel was led by former federal cabinet minister Thomas Hockin. About 40 years of prior debate and research preceded this panel's 11 months of deliberations which culminated in a forgone conclusion that a single, national securities regulator would be more efficient and effective than the current 13 provincial securities regulatory organizations. Today, Canada is the only Group of Seven (G7) member without a single national securities watchdog. Even with this new recommendation, it is naive to think that the provincial regulators will go quietly into the night; the Expert Panel's recommendation to keep existing staff in place and simply change the reporting lines may appease most provinces during the transition period. In the coming months, we?ll watch the Obama administration take over the reins on the U.S. SEC's 21st Century Disclosure Initiative; the U.S. blueprint for a modernized disclosure system based on interactive data, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). We'll also see the Dutch and Australian governments quietly roll out their own financial data standardization and infrastructure modernization efforts to unify across government information silos. The time has come for Canada to join the modern era, and a move to a single regulatory body is certainly a step in the right direction and bodes well for the advancement of significant regulatory standards like XBRL.

Next Steps for Canada

Unifying the 13 provincial securities regulators will be a good first step towards streamlining the capital markets regulators and giving Canada an economy of scale for modernizing infrastructure and the underpinnings of Canadian regulatory processes. The next step is to get the Harper government to fund the much needed overhaul and modernization of the regulatory system. President Obama's upcoming visit to Canada would be a good time for the Harper government to enter discussions with the U.S. about using XBRL for the filings process to:

gain overall efficiencies by leveraging global standards,
aid in the transparency of financial data,
help mitigate risks in the regulator process; and
improve the accuracy and quality of the financial data being reported.

Harper's Finance team should also take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to break down governmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. This SBR approach relies heavily on XBRL because the Dutch and Australian governments have recognized the interdependent nature of government agencies and the increased need for information sharing via a standards-based approach. With XBRL projects underway across the globe, it doesn't take a genius to see the writing on the wall for more cross-agency, cross-jurisdictional, cross-border cooperation and a standards-based approach are needed to manage the risks that the current global financial crisis has highlighted.

About XBRL

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a royalty-free, open specification for software that uses XML data tags to describe financial information for public and private companies and other organizations. XBRL benefits all members of the financial information supply chain by utilizing a standards-based method with which users can prepare, publish in a variety of formats, exchange and analyze financial statements and the information they contain. XBRL International is a non-profit consortium of approximately 500 organizations worldwide working together to build the XBRL language and promote and support its adoption. XBRL International is responsible for the technical XBRL specification and each country-specific jurisdiction works to facilitate the development and adoption of local XBRL taxonomies, or dictionaries, consistent with accounting, regulatory, and market standards and practices.

About XBRL Canada

XBRL Canada is the non-profit consortium for XML business reporting standards in Canada and is a jurisdiction of XBRL International. It represents the business information supply chain, including accounting firms, software companies, financial databases, financial printers and government agencies. To join or learn more about XBRL in Canada, please visit us at http://www.xbrl.ca

Will Obama's Technology Push Extend to Financial Regulators?

dmueller2001 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:54:02 +0000

By Diane Mueller

Obama's technology-savvy election team worked very effectively to leverage a new world order of YouTube, social networking, and blogging tools to promote his agenda, connect with a nation of voters, and raise campaign funds. But does he really know what it's going to take to overhaul and connect all the disparate government information systems that the U.S. Federal bureaucracy has built up over the past 200 years? He has certainly raised hopes and set expectations high for both the technology and financial sectors.

Obama's Finance Team Appointments: A Great First Step

Even though SEC Chairman Christopher Cox has been criticized for not paying enough attention to details of the subprime meltdown and other fiascos like the Madoff Ponzi scheme, hopefully his legacy around interactive data (XBRL) and EDGAR modernization will still be preserved. All signs are good so far.

Obama's selection of Mary Schapiro to spearhead the SEC makes sense. As head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), her insider's knowledge of the SEC along with her understanding of the need for cross-agency, cross-jurisdictional and cross-borders cooperation is encouraging. In speeches post 9/11, Schapiro talked a good game about applying large doses of technological creativity to resolve the issues that were then plaguing the financial markets and the regulatory institutions. If she brings those ideas and enthusiasm to the SEC and other bastions of federal regulation to break down the information silos across government agencies, markets, and borders, we should be in good shape with XBRL advancement.

Shapiro will also be working with Gary Gensler, former undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance and Obama's pick to head up the Commodity Futures Trade Commission. You can bet they will be working closely together as both agencies have come under severe criticism in the wake of the financial meltdown. Suggestions of a proposed merger of the two agencies may eventually leave one of them without a job.

In addition, Obama also plans to appoint a new cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to upgrade government computer systems. He wants the nation's first CTO to "ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the 21st century." The future CTO has the opportunity to be really instrumental in modernizing financial regulatory processes like XBRL by:

promoting cross-agency cooperation on standards-based approaches to create a common taxonomy for information sharing;
creating a single sign-on world for all government online activities; and
working across traditional jurisdictional boundaries to break the federal, state, and municipal information-sharing barriers so that our enforcement agencies can truly share information efficiently and securely.

Moving Forward with Interactive Data aka XBRL

As Obama assembles his financial team, there is excitement about his emphasis on leveraging technology to gain efficiencies in other areas of government. For example, he's pledged to invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to implement standards-based electronic health information systems. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come. This new finance team can restore confidence by leading and accelerating the current federal modernization efforts underway that are using standards-based XBRL technology to help resolve this latest series of disasters plaguing the financial markets and regulatory institutions.

Obama's team should also take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to breakdown the governmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. This SBR approach relies heavily on XBRL technology, or "interactive data," as Chairman Cox likes to call it. The Dutch and Australian governments have recognized the interdependent nature of government agencies and the increased need for information-sharing via a standards-based approach. Targeting financial reporting early, as the SEC has, is a good first step and should be continued. With XBRL projects underway at both the FDIC and the SEC, it doesn't take a genius to see the writing is on the wall -- more cross-agency cooperation and a standards-based approach is needed to drive XBRL forward during the Obama administration.

Beyond securities regulation, federal financial management could also use a creative dose of technology. Obama's new CTO should support the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the overall government accounting community in their efforts to prepare consolidated financial statements and to modernize the processes that account for and reconcile intra-governmental activity and balances between federal agencies. Sharing a common data dictionary of all financial terms that can be used across the public sector will streamline financial statements submitted to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and simplify reporting to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This information-sharing need not stop at the federal level -- pilot XBRL projects in Nevada and Oregon point to a growing awareness of the potential to cross state and municipal borders too.

As Chairman Cox recently pointed out, "Paper and financial representations of paper can't keep pace with financial engineering and digital capital markets." Hindsight is everything, and perhaps if interactive data had been in place, the Madoff fiasco and the subprime mortgage crisis might have been averted or at least detected sooner.

XBRL technology can help facilitate the detection of such schemes, streamline audit and accounting processes, and help regulators put early warning systems in place. There is lack of confidence in today's market, and the federal government needs to focus on modernizing their infrastructure to build transparency. Migrating financial information to a standards-based XML format will enable faster and more accurate data analysis.

Let's hope that the six degrees of separation from the Madoff scandal doesn't touch any of Obama's nominees and that they all pass the Senate confirmation hearings quickly. Then we can all get back to the important standards development work at hand and provide support for their efforts to restore confidence in our financial market.

XBRL: Mashing up Financial Statements

xbrlspy — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:45:51 +0000

by Derek Abdinor from ReadWriteWeb.com, December 22, 2008

Amid the dark days on Wall Street and in global markets, it seems to be up to technology to step up and deliver solid analysis and rational scrutiny. The US market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ratified a proposal on Wednesday for public companies and mutual fund companies to file their financial statements in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). The XML-based language is also known as "Interactive Data" in financial circles and promises faster analysis with wider coverage. All things being equal, it will mitigate the poor analysis and regulation that's been contributing to stupendously bad financial decisions.

Companies have traditionally filed on paper, in ASCII, or in HTML: all essentially lifeless formats for conducting any meaningful comparison or analysis. With XBRL, every line item is given a tag that identifies it and its role in the financial statement. Imagine that a line item -- say, "Net Income" -- is tagged like a migrating goose (which frequently happens, I'm told). That goose is part of a flight of geese, which may change their course mid-flight, fly over national borders, have babies, and even join another flight. But thanks to the vital information on the goose's tag, we never lose the original information, and we are even able to see it in the context of other information.

Financial accounts are the same. Figures get re-purposed all over the place, which leads to input errors, or worse. It's easy to cover up information or fail to notice business risks when the analysis is relegated to a footnote somewhere, and you're reading the annual report like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.

When financial data is tagged, it's begging to get mashed up. Take a look at this comparison of executive pay, this dynamic charting, and the SEC's own repository and viewer. Software exists that can be first used upstream with the creation of management accounts and go all the way through to taxonomy design, document tagging, and viewing. One would be able to call up income statements of two or more companies in different sectors and different countries and compare line items in seconds.

But to see XBRL simply as a means of marking up financial statements at the end of a financial reporting period is to miss the rest of the iceberg. If financial items are automatically tagged upon their creation using a system like SAP, the rich analysis can be filtered through the enterprise and to suppliers. Triggers and reports can be generated on the fly. Knowledge workers will be manipulating XBRL without knowing it by its accurate, albeit consonant-heavy, name.

XBRL, by its nature, has largely escaped the wave of Enterprise 2.0 functionality. But the openness of the data, its ability to be mashed up and displayed in previously unthought-of ways, will impress itself upon a public disillusioned with poor financial management -- management that has itself partly relied on poor data. It's time for some developer rock stars to step in and make those spreadsheets sing.

More about XBRL

Often described as being simply complex, XBRL should be approached from a technological, as well as an accounting, perspective. XBRL is simply a flavor of XML. Financial line items, totals, text, and metadata are XML elements that are mapped to a predefined schema (called a "taxonomy" in XBRL). In all cases, these taxonomies are the financial rules of accounting for that jurisdiction. Throw in XPath, XLink, and more, and you have a mature language for tagging and submitting your financials.

An introductory resource to begin with is Wikipedia, which links to the various regulatory bodies, IT initiatives, and current issues. The "XBRL in Plain English" video is specific to executive summaries.

by Derek Abdinor, a divisional director at motiv - the Investor and Branding agency of Ince, a large communications concern from South Africa.

The SEC, Madoff and XBRL

xbrlspy — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:41:11 +0000

Dec 16th 2008 2:10AM from blog maverick - the mark cuban blog

You probably have never heard of XBRL. If you havent, and you are the least bit interested in how regulatory agencies can avoid future Madoff like events, and in government transparency for our bailout tax dollars, you should take a minute to get up to speed on what XBRL can do.

XBRL is a version of XML for financial reporting. To the SEC’s credit, they have become a big proponent, requiring $5 Billion Market Cap companies to start reporting using XBRL as of this past June, with the next 1800 in market size required in 2009, and everyone else in 2010. The value of XBRL is that by creating standardized tags for data elements (ie, net income , cash, interest, etc), companies will not only have to conform their financial statement line items to the defined tags, but in doing so it will make it much easier for investors and regulators alike to analyze and compare the financials of various companies. All good so far.

Here comes the but..

XBRL is here and ready, but our government isnt using it for anything it does. Tracking the bailout would be a perfect application for XBRL. There is absolutely no reason why we couldnt or shouldnt use it since all technical systems and reporting requirements would be new and could easily be built around XBRL.

IN addition, there is no reason why every entity that has to report to the SEC, and even those that don’t shouldn’t be required to use XBRL. From investment advisors like Madoff, to hedge funds, to mutual funds, to ETFs, brokers, dealers, market makers,to banks and each and every loan that is made, you name it, all should be required to format their financial data in XBRL. In fact, the smart thing for the SEC to do is to demand that any new financial instrument, regulated or not, needs to have an XBRL taxonomy assigned to it for future reporting pursposes before it could be sold. This would simplify any future reporting requirements and allow the SEC to review and analyze before its regulates, having the advantage of a body of data to guide it. For the filing companies, It certainly would not be a hardship. It is no worse than requiring websites to use HTML before they can publish to the web. Its that easy.

By acquiring data in XBRL format, it becomes easy to import into databases that can be monitored and analyzed. Think of it as turning the government into a quant shop for data they receive. Like a quant shop, the data could be monitored and analyzed in realtime looking for everything and anything it believes are indicative of problems, including the Madoff test for no variability in reported returns.

The beauty of this system is that while it wont catch everything, it will automate much of what had been a manual process of review by regulatory staff. It wont take a painstaking audit of suspects chosen on a best efforts basis. Outliers and exceptions will quickly become apparent as will trends and repetitive problems.

Not only will XBRL be a tool for government, but it could be a tool for government watchdogs as well. We as taxpayers should demand that every penny spent and committed be defined in XBRL and presented on a .gov site in realtime. We can start with the bailout money and how its being spent. In fact, President Obama’s use or lack of use of XBRL for government will be a beacon as to just how much transparency we can expect from his administration.

We are about to enter a period where the most recommended solution for avoiding future crisis like the one we are experiencing now, is increased regulation. I happen to agree with the SEC Commisioner when he said “Transparency is a powerful antidote for what ails our capital markets“ We can never come up with perfect regulations to solve the problems we have yet to see. WE will never anticipate the results of unintended consequences. We can require that all those that participate in the capital markets contribute their data and hope that the data guides us to avoid those problems.

Far from perfect I know, but its far better than what happens today http://blogmaverick.com/2008/12/16/the-sec-madoff-and-xbrl/

SEC Approves Interactive Data for Financial Reporting by Public Companies, Mutual Funds

xbrlspy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:15:11 +0000

Chairman Cox's Statement: TEXT VIDEO

Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2008 — The Securities and Exchange Commission has voted to require public companies and mutual funds to use interactive data for financial information, which has the potential to increase the speed, accuracy and usability of financial disclosure and eventually reduce costs for investors.

With interactive data, all of the facts in a financial statement are labeled with unique computer-readable "tags," which function like bar codes to make financial information more searchable on the Internet and more readable by spreadsheets and other software. Investors will be able to instantly find specific facts disclosed by companies and mutual funds, and compare that information with details about other companies and mutual funds to help them make investment decisions.

"Interactive data will help provide investors with the information they need, rather than just a warehouse of forms on which they can try to find it," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. "Interactive data will enable new analysis tools to put key information at every investor's fingertips within seconds, exactly as the investor wishes to see it."

For public companies, interactive data financial reporting will occur on a phased-in schedule beginning next year. The largest companies who file using U.S. GAAP with a public float above $5 billion will be required to provide interactive data reports starting with their first quarterly report for fiscal periods ending on or after June 15, 2009. This will cover approximately 500 companies. The remaining companies who file using U.S. GAAP will be required to file with interactive data on a phased-in schedule over the next two years. Companies reporting in IFRS issued by the International Accounting Standards Board will be required to provide their interactive data reports starting with fiscal years ending on or after June 15, 2011.

Companies will be able to adopt interactive data earlier than their required start date. All U.S. public companies will have filed interactive data financial information by December 2011 for use by investors.

John White, Director of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, said, "The adoption of the interactive data requirement represents the product of more than three years of research, analysis and testing through our voluntary filing program — as well as the work of many people throughout the Commission. Interactive data is ready now for companies to provide, and for investors to use in their decision making."

Mutual fund investors will begin reaping the benefits of interactive data starting in 2011. Mutual funds will be required to begin including data tags in their public filings that supply investors with such information as objectives and strategies, risks, performance, and costs. This will allow investors to compare more than 8,000 mutual funds at the click of a mouse. A mutual fund also would be required to post the interactive data on its Web site, if it maintains one.

"This action will continue the Commission's strides towards using technology to provide investors with increased access to information about mutual funds," said Andrew J. Donohue, Director of the SEC's Division of Investment Management. "Just last month, the Commission adopted a new mutual fund disclosure framework that will provide investors with key mutual fund information in a concise, plain English format, while using technology to retain the comprehensive quality of the mutual fund information available today. Similarly, the rules adopted today will allow investors, through technology, to compare and analyze information among the array of funds offered in the market."

SEC Chief Accountant Conrad Hewitt said, "Accounting is the business language of the world. Interactive data has the potential to greatly enhance that language, making it easier, more informative and more readily available. Traditional financial statements that we have today will become more transparent and understandable as interactive searchable documents."

David M. Blaszkowsky, Director of the SEC's Office of Interactive Disclosure, added, "The availability of financial reports in the form of interactive data will transform how investors evaluate companies and securities and, more broadly, transform the relationship between the filer and the investor. Markets depend on and improve with better information, and even more so in difficult times. This action by the Commission is timely and welcome for investors in the U.S. and all over the world."

The SEC earlier this year unveiled its new financial reporting system — IDEA (Interactive Data Electronic Applications) — to accept interactive data filings and give investors faster and easier access to key financial information about public companies and mutual funds. The new IDEA system is supplementing and eventually replacing the agency's 1980s-era EDGAR database, marking the SEC's transition from collecting forms and documents to making financial information itself freely available to investors.

Investors can begin seeing this new information at http://idea.sec.gov. For participants in the SEC's Voluntary Filer Program, investors can find clearly labeled buttons taking them to a company or mutual fund's voluntary interactive data submissions. As soon as companies and funds make their mandatory interactive data submissions to the SEC, their financial information will be immediately available to investors through the SEC's IDEA system as well as on the Web sites of companies and funds disclosing the data.

# # #

http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-300.htm

Chairman Cox Statement: TEXT VIDEO

XBRL Victory! SEC Mandate of XBRL Extends Benefits of Financial Standards

dmueller2001 — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:21:41 +0000

by Diane Mueller

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission mandate of XBRL is great news! It’s a triumph for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who played a pivotal role in ensuring the modernization of IT infrastructure of the EDGAR filing system based on XBRL — an initiative that may be a his most lasting legacy and a final feather in his cap.

And, of course, the SEC’s XBRL mandate is great news for the financial community at large. XBRL holds the promise of revolutionizing business reporting on a global scale, dramatically improving the relationship between people, processes, accounting standards, and financial information. How? By ensuring that a company’s financial reporting is always an authoritative reflection of the latest version of the truth within the enterprise.

XBRL lets reviewers look at financial data in a highly interactive format that is much more accessible by various line-of-business applications and composite applications. Documents empowered with XBRL are more richly described and can be consumed much more readily by applications such as risk management, financial analysis, and audit.

Chairman Cox puts the matter plainly when he says that XBRL “means allowing average Americans the ability to view exactly the financial information that they want. We are on a campaign to liberate business and financial information that…is currently trapped inside dense documents.”. With adoption of this mandate, the SEC moves from document disclosure to data disclosure improving searchablity and accessibility. XBRL makes the rendering.of financial data in its various forms more easily accessible to investors.

XBRL is already mandated for financial filings in multiple jurisdictions worldwide, so the SEC mandate simply moves the U.S. into global alignment with other regulators. Also, the SEC mandate, combined with the trend toward the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), opens the possibility for true global comparability of financial documents.

To date, the potential for XBRL remains largely unexplored due to the gap between worker knowledge and access to new services that can view, consume, and work with this new format. Financial documents still remain largely focused on unstructured and disconnected data built and viewed with non-XBRL aware applications.

Going forward, however, the SEC announcement in combination with new advances in XBRL data-centric documents-based technology, management, search capabilities and dynamic content enrichment offer a promising lifeline to help solve XBRL’s tenuous relationship with people and task-oriented knowledge. One thing is for sure — XBRL is not going away, so it is time for organizations to get comfortable with the standard and create a solid plan for adoption.

US SEC publish Sunshine Meeting Notice for XBRL Mandate -

xbrlspy — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:48:34 +0000

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Sunshine Act Meeting.

Notice is hereby given, pursuant to the provisions of the Government in the Sunshine Act, Pub. L. 94-409, that the Securities and Exchange Commission will hold an Open Meeting on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 10:00 a.m., in the Auditorium, Room L-002.

The subject matter of the Open Meeting will be:

Item 1: The Commission will consider whether to approve the 2009 budget of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and will consider the related annual accounting support fee for the Board under Section 109 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Item 2: The Commission will consider whether to adopt amendments to provide for companies' financial statement information to be filed with the Commission in interactive data format, according to a specified phase-in schedule.

Item 3: The Commission will consider whether to adopt amendments to provide for mutual fund risk/return summary information to be filed with the Commission in interactive data format. The Commission will also consider whether to adopt amendments to permit investment companies to submit portfolio holdings information under the Commission's interactive data voluntary program without being required to submit other financial information.

Item 4: The Commission will consider whether to adopt amendments that would define terms related to annuity contracts under the Securities Act of 1933, and whether to adopt amendments related to periodic reporting requirements under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

At times, changes in Commission priorities require alterations in the scheduling of meeting items.

For further information and to ascertain what, if any, matters have been added, deleted or postponed, please contact:

The Office of the Secretary at (202) 551-5400.

Florence E. Harmon
Acting Secretary

December 10, 2008

http://www.sec.gov/news/openmeetings/2008/ssamtg121708.htm

SEC poised to finalise rule on interactive data format

xbrlspy — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:28:22 +0000

from Accountancy Age, 09 Dec 2008 Christopher Cox, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman, said in a speech to the American Institute of Certified Practicing Accountants (AICPA) national conference on current SEC and PCAOB developments yesterday, published on Mondovisione, the commission would later this month finalise its proposed rule on the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). He noted the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation and AICPA had been aggressively supporting XBRL to provide investors with all public company financial reports in interactive data format. The rule would significantly advance the objective of having 30 different spoken languages soon embedded in XBRL data tags attached to public company financial statements, enabling investors read an International Fincancil Reporting Standards (IFRS) or US GAAP financial statements from any country in their own native language. He stressed that, for IFRS to fulfill its promise 'to be a uniter of the world's capital markets and a powerful tool for investors everywhere', the standards had to be crafted in the interest of investors; the standard setting process must be transparent; and all of stakeholders themselves participate in the standard setting process. 'The only real question is not whether this is good for investors, but how quickly both the accounting standards and the process by which they are established and developed can be globally recognized as world-class,' he said.

XBRL Consortium published Technical Road Map

xbrlspy — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:47:38 +0000

From time to time, the XBRL International Standards Board (XSB) of the XBRL International Consortium publishes it's technical roadmap of the planned activities.The latest such roadmap has just been published and is available from the XSB page on the XBRL.org website - http://www.xbrl.org/StandardsBoard/

The specific URL is http://www.xbrl.org/XSB/XBRL-International-Technical-WGs-Roadmap-2008-11-26.htm