XBRL: The teenage years.

• Author: Gray, Glen L.
• Position: New Technologies - Brief Article

XBRL is moving rapidly from its infancy into adolescence. The XBRL consortium now has more than 170 member organizations worldwide. In fact, says Rob Adler, president of Corporate Communications Broadcast Network, which manages and hosts investor relations Web sites, "By 2003 or earlier, we expect XBRL to be the standard for financial reporting."

But XBRL is not limited to financial reporting: General Electric plans to use XBRL Creator from Enumerate Solutions to gather information from more than 150 distinct general ledgers to help prepare its 40,000-page federal tax return.

SWINGING INTO ACTION

The XBRL 2.0 Specification was published last year establishing the structure and rules for using XML technology for a standardized representation of business reporting. A variety of taxonomies--or specific implementations--are being modified or developed to meet that specification.

Additionally, several government agencies, regulators and stock exchanges are evaluating XBRL. The SEC allows companies to post supplementary XBRL information to EDGAR in addition to the SEC-required format.

Nasdaq expects XBRL to improve the distribution and analysis of business information-particularly for the 10,000 companies not covered by Wall Street analysts. Currently, it may not be cost-effective to analyze these companies because it is labor intensive to extract business information from paper documents and SEC filings. With XBRL it could be a simple matter of downloading the data into a spreadsheet.

The FDIC is evaluating XBRL for bank reporting. While the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program-whose membership includes the Department of Treasury, General Accounting Office and Office of Management and Budget-has suggested that financial data should be exchanged using XBRL. They plan to leverage XBRL's straight-through reporting that allows incoming XBRL reports to be dropped directly into internal databases instead of re-entered from paper reports.

Morgan Stanley www.morganstanley.com/xbrl; Reuters, http://about.reuters.com/results/2001-prlhtml/xbrl.asp; and Microsoft, www.microsoft.com/msft have posted XBRL-formatted financials on their Web sites. EDGAR Online has established a Web site for companies that want to post XBRL financial reports, www.xbrl-express.com. The site currently has demonstration versions of financial statements for a wide variety of companies.

AN SEC REQUIREMENT?

The Enron collapse has increased interest in XBRL. The SEC is...