COA Solutions – Business Accounting Software

Two recent announcements from the SEC may start to breathe life into the XBRL initiative that is doing anything but delivering on the early promises of reduced cost, greater efficiency and improved accuracy.

XBRL, (Extensible Business Reporting Language), a ‘language for the electronic communication of business and financial data’, is being developed by the non-profit organisation XBRL International, to improve the standard of financial reporting for investors, analysts and journalists).

In May 2008, the SEC stated that the largest US organisations should be filing their main reports via XBRL and that other listed US organisations should be filing via XBRL within 3 years. This was followed up by the statement in September 2008 that the SEC is potentially looking to move to IFRS by 2014.

These are two of the clearest signs yet that there may soon be one single global taxonomy (IFRS) and that all US listed organisations will be required to file their reports via XBRL, potentially by IFRS

This will increase the global drive for the adoption of XBRL, following up local initiatives in Australia, Belgium, Japan, France, Norway and here in the UK. We have already been able to submit accounts to Companies House and Corporation Tax comps to HMRC – but this has yet to go mainstream in the UK.

These recent moves from the SEC may rekindle interest in the benefits that XBRL has for the reporting and consumption of financial and business data.  We continue to watch with interest

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Tags: abrl, business, electronic communication, sec

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Musings, Technical by Richard Anning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.