The XBRL Canada Blog

2009-11-06T07:10:00.000-05:00

Annual XBRL Canada Conference

The annual conference was held yesterday in Toronto and it was a successful and high quality event. An interested audience posed good questions to the panellists, leading to some stimulating discussion. The presentations are now on the XBRL Canada website and are available for download.

2009-11-05T18:18:00.002-05:00

Thompson Reuters files in XBRL

Thompson Reuters Corporation has filed their interim financials on SEDAR in XBRL. The company filed their unaudited consolidated financial statements for the period ended June 30, 2009 in XBRL under the Canadian Securities Administrators’ Voluntary Filing Program. They filed using the 2009 IFRS taxonomy. They are the largest company to file under the voluntary program to date and also the first to file using IFRS. The XBRL files can be viewed at this link.

2009-10-21T09:46:00.000-04:00

Paul Cherry, Chair of the International Accounting Standards Board, is to speak on IFRS Convergence at the XBRL Canada Annual Conference in Toronto. Other speakers will include David Blazkouske of the SEC, Andrew Lowe of the OSC and several vendors and exhibitors. The theme of the conference is to provide regulatory filers and potential filers with an up-to-date status report and concrete help in getting organized for the adoption of IFRS and XBRL.

The conference will take place at the Toronto Convention Center on November 5 beginning at 9AM. For the full agenda and registration details, please go to www.xbrl.ca.

2009-10-16T13:52:00.001-04:00

Annual Conference – XBRL Canada

November 5, 2009, Toronto Convention Center

FOR THE AGENDA AND TO REGISTER PLEASE GO TO WWW.XBRL.CA

SPEAKERS FROM THE SEC, CSA, IASB, XBRL INTERNATIONAL AND A VARIETY OF VENDORS OF XBRL SOLUTIONS.

A PRACTICAL EVENT THAT WILL HELP FILERS DECIDE ON AN APPROACH TO FILING WITH REGULATORS.

2009-10-13T09:31:00.002-04:00

Canada's new Chief Information Officer

Ms Corinne Charette has been named CIO for Canada. "In this role she is responsible for establishing strategies, directions and policy for the Government in the areas of Information Technology, Information Management, Security, Privacy and Access to Information." The role includes a mandate for improving the transparency of information.

In a related article, it was pointed out that Canada has lost ground since the 1990s as a leader in information technology in government. At one time, the eGovernment program was lauded around the world as a model of government usage of technology, particularly the internet, for making services available online to all Canadians.

Now we are lagging noticeably behind in the adoption of new technologies. XBRL is a notable example. Many other countries in the world have adopted XBRL as a means to improve transparency of information and improve the efficiency with which information can be moved around and made available in forms that are far more useful than the old printed form methods. The Netherlands, Australia, Britain, and much of Europe has adopted XBRL in one way or another towards this end. As a result, their information can be made available freely and easily across platforms within government departments and to the public.

The old ways of handling information are not good enough any more. One hopes that Ms Chartette seizes the opportunity she has in her new role to bring about change - change that will usher in a new era of information availability, mobility and transparency.

2009-10-07T16:29:00.000-04:00

XBRL Canada Annual Meeting
Toronto November 5, 2009

A national press release has just been issued to announce the forthcoming XBRL event to be held in Toronto on November 5. See the press release here. Further details will be coming out shortly.

2009-09-18T07:12:00.003-04:00

Reserve this Date

November 5, 2009

Toronto Convention Center

XBRL Canada will be holding a major event focused on the needs of regulatory filers on November 5 in Toronto.

The event will feature a number of vendors who will demonstrate their products and be available to discuss approaches to filing. Prominent speakers will also discuss Canadian and US regulatory requirements. Further details will be announced soon.

Registrations will be limited so it is advisable to get yours in early by sending an email to lucia.ng@cica.ca.

Vendors who wish to participate should contact Jerry Trites at gtrites@zorba.ca. Cost of vendor participation will be $1000 for members and $2500 for non-members. Participants will be featured as event sponsors and will be able to set up booths and banners and make a presentation to the audience.

XBRL Canada is sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.

2009-09-12T07:12:00.002-04:00

Improving Access to Government Data on the Web
By Diane Mueller

On September 4th, the President took another important step toward a more open and transparent government by announcing a new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records. Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of their necessarily confidential nature, the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour or to conduct business will be released. As historic as the President’s announcement is, it is also a good illustration of what is missing from the administration’s technology infrastructure plan — a coordinated approach to providing data standards.

On the surface, this new disclosure of visitor data looks perfectly fine. The data made available in a simple Comma Separated Values (.csv) file is easily downloaded and opened into a spreadsheet for viewing purposes.

Take a step beyond simple viewing, and try to mash up this content to see where the visitor’s list collides with other interest groups and data sources — you begin to get an idea of the complex nature of data mapping. For example, think of mashing up this visitor information with the U.S. SEC filings that include the names and remuneration of executives of publicly traded companies tagged in XBRL.

Better yet, simply try to blog about someone’s visit to the White House and reference a snippet from the .csv content. Then go to Twitter and post a tweet with a link to your blog so you can have bragging rights about being the first to notice some VIP’s visit. If I then repost the information on my blog and one of my readers wants to get back to the source file to verify the facts without some form of metadata and URI associated with the content, there is no path back to the original source. Therefore, there is no validation that the information is accurate. When I repost your information on my blog, I am simply trusting your cutting and pasting skills and trusting that you accurately interpreted the information. This can be a potentially dangerous situation that often leads to a lot of misinformed “noise.”

So far, in the marriage of social networks and open government, there has been a lot of “noise” coming in, but there has been very little done in the way of creating constructive solutions for accurate and trusted citizen participation.

Without the metadata about the newly disclosed visitor content or any other government information, the accuracy with which data is interpreted is jeopardized with each reuse. Without a link back to the source, the authenticity of the content is no longer discoverable. Without this information, it’s all just more “noise” on the web.

Where Does XML Fit in?

XML industry standards bring metadata to the content. Even a simple XML schema and an instance document would have gone a long way to ensure that, regardless of what tool consumed the visitor data (including spreadsheets), the information would always be interpreted in the same manner. Furthermore, the use of an XML industry standard for identity would enable one to leverage existing tools to mash up the content with other data sources. The key benefit of XML is that consuming applications no longer requires someone to reinvent clever ways of mapping and representing complex data, so developers can expend their energies on solving higher level problems that have a greater return.

There are plenty of other examples across federal, state and municipal government agencies that build the case for leveraging XML industry standards to aid in creating greater transparency and to create efficiencies for the agencies themselves.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Recovery.gov and multiple other individual government agency projects have taken strides forward to granting the public access to government data. However, cross-agency conversations are still taking place to get some agreement on common data models for comparing and mashing up information from multiple data sources accurately.

Efforts such as the NIEM XBRL harmonization discussions should be applauded as this combined effort should aid in the accurate mapping of government financial data across agencies. There is still a long way to go before we can start to leverage the really interesting technologies like Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Semantic Web.

While everyone wants to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, designing the technology infrastructure to ensure that it is done in an open, transparent and accurate manner requires a lot of cross-agency collaboration. The administration’s goal should be to ensure that the public can collaborate on the analysis and dissemination of public information across the web in a manner that can be trusted, authenticated and redistributed without imposing a cost burden on the consumers or the producers of that information. That is no small task.

This all leaves me wondering if I am guessing correctly about what was being talked about in the White House on 7/14/2009 at 3:00:00PM and about who was in the room. If my assumptions are right — loosely based on about 22,200 Google hits for Stephen J. Hemsley, who was listed as visiting Aneesh Chopra, for whom there are about 1,170,000 Google hits — I’m guessing a lot of these same data topics were addressed with a slight healthcare twist. But then again, I’m doing the interpretations here and making the free associations, so you’ll just have to trust me.

To add your input to the conversation about improving data access on the web, join us at the Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web on October 5-6, 2009, in Arlington, VA, that is co-organized by W3C and XBRL International, Inc. and hosted by the FDIC.

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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.

2009-08-27T06:43:00.003-04:00

Financial Reporting in Flux
by Gerald Trites, FCA

Financial reporting has been undergoing a process of change for several years. At one time, the focus was on the financial statements, and much else that was reported was an offshoot of the statements. Accountants spent much of their time preparing these financial statements for "general use" in accordance with "generally accepted accounting principles." That still happens of course, but there has been a lot more going on as well.

Companies have been expanding the types of data they present to stakeholders. A research study published by the CICA last year identified more than 50 types of information presented by companies, of which the financial statements is only one type. The rest of it consists of major items like the MD&A and less extensive items like the President's Report.

What's more, the data is being presented much more often. Where it was originally presented annually, then quarterly, now there is a constant flow of information. The central vehicle for presenting this information has become the corporate website.

Add to this the idea that companies have been organizing their data through the use of ERP systems and integration software and you have a scenario that is going to evolve more quickly than many of us imagine.

Companies will be called upon the make available increasing quantities of their data to the public directly from their systems on a real time basis. That is the trend. companies will deny it and resist it, but it is bound to happen through the demands of stakeholders.

The implications of this are tremendous, not the least of which are issues around establishing data integrity and obtaining independent assurance. But it does mean that there will be a need for a standard with which the data can be presented and used. Filling this need is when XBRL will achieve a new level of usefulness. Indeed, that is a role in which XBRL will be able to achieve its full potential.

2009-08-24T13:07:00.002-04:00

Why XBRL?
by Gerald Trites, FCA

There are still questions being raised by knowledgable people asking why we are getting into XBRL and what the value is of it. A vast quantity of material has been written about this topic, and yet it seems that there is still a need for more. This post is a modest attempt to explain why XBRL is not only desirable, but necessary.

Data is at the core of business activity. Everyone in or connected to business activity understands this fully. Managements spend much of their time digesting and acting on data. Investors need relevant and accurate data in order to make their decisions. Regulators need data to enable them to understand whether their charges are behaving within the ambit of the applicable rules and regulations.

Also, it is no secret that in recent years, the volume of data that these people need to cope with has expanded tremendously. Annual reports, for example, which once were a couple dozen or so pages have grown to hundreds of pages. And the Annual Reports have become only a small part of the data that is made available to investors. Notes to financial statements are becoming legendary in terms of their volume and complexity.

Investors, managements, analysts and regulators all need to try to understand all this data. They certainly have their work cut out for them.

It was this growing volume of data, combined with the effects of the Sarbanes Oxley act that prompted the SEC to require XBRL. They knew that to do a proper job of handling and analyzing all this data would require hiring large numbers of people, and they didn’t have the budget for that. Their only alternative was to find a technology solution.

XBRL was a solution because it enables data to be transferred from a source system to a destination system without human intervention. What’s more, the XBRL tags contain a lot of data about that data (metadata) which enables the receiving system to perform a lot of analysis, again, without human intervention. That leaves the humans with the ability to budget their time to spend on the most important areas, the ones that need the most attention. In addition – a real bonus, the XBRL data is formatted in accordance with internationally recognized standards, which make it easy to ensure the sending and receiving systems are compatible.

For investors and analysts, the present system involves obtaining data and inputting or importing it into spreadsheets and then trying to format it into some form that might be useful. Everyone knows that manually inputting data is inefficient and error prone. Then they need to call the company and ask questions about the numbers they have laboured on, many of which would have been answered automatically by the XBRL metadata.

With XBRL, they can save a great deal of time even with conventional spreadsheets. The software industry has been working on some tools that they can use that will be even better, although they have been slow. But they are coming. Better analyst coverage means better investment decisions, and lower cost of capital.

So why XBRL? It automates many things that are presently being done manually, but that are no longer feasible with the vast amount of data that must be handled. That’s not just something that is nice to have, it’s something that is absolutely essential.

2009-08-21T08:36:00.006-04:00

XBRL and IFRS
A Missed Opportunity?

One of the big reasons Canadian companies say they are holding off on XBRL is because they are caught in the throes of IFRS implementation. This is understandable, since IFRS implementation for most companies is a huge undertaking. However, the reason may also be somewhat fallacious in that there can be economies in implementing both simultaneously, even though this may not be intuitively obvious.

The thing is, when implementing IFRS, companies need to dig into the IFRS standards, and understand how it affects individual items in their financial statements as compared to Canadian GAAP.

In implementing XBRL, a roadmap showing the impact of IFRS on individual items is provided through the IFRS taxonomy. All major taxonomies contain reference linkbases, that contain references to the standards underlying particular elements in the taxonomy. The reference linkbase in the IFRS taxonomy contains the name, number and date of issue for the standards relevant to each particular financial statement item.

Those who are implementing IFRS may gain valuable insight into the effects of IFRS by using the IFRS taxonomy as a helpful aid.

Of course, the Canadian GAAP taxonomies also contain reference linkbases that refer to the relevant Canadian standards. Therefore, using both the Canadian and IFRS taxonomies, there is a cross referencing roadmap available for IFRS implementation enabling reference to the Canadian standards and comparison to the IFRS standards.

XBRL Canada is in process of building a convergence tool that is soon to go into testing phase. The prototype is available on the web, and will soon contain mappings from a common point (the giffe) to both the IFRS and Canadian GAAP taxonomies, and can be used to produce preliminary instance documents in both sets of standards for comparison.

Companies that defer XBRL implementation until after IFRS implementation may be missing an opportunity to achieve some real efficiencies for both projects.

2009-08-19T06:27:00.002-04:00

BRAG

A very interesting and well developed site has been launched by the Business Reporting Advisory Group. This is a consultancy that originated in Europe but operates around the world. It's worth a look.

2009-08-10T07:54:00.003-04:00

Tracking Companies Filing Interactive Data with the US

The best way to track companies filing xbrl data with the SEC is by using the RSS feed they have made available. Unfortunately it only provides the last 100 filings. The inability to search for all xbrl filings is an amazing shortcoming in the SEC's new search interface called the Next Generation System. Why the SEC did not provide the ability to search out all xbrl filings is a complete mystery. They could have done it easily, just like SEDAR does. Here's a link to the RSS Feed.

There is an expectation that a number of cross-listed Canadian companies will be filing. Some are required to since they meet the first round requirements of market cap of $5 billion or more and the use of US GAAP. So far, we have noticed Tim Hortons and CN Rail.

2009-08-04T12:24:00.001-04:00

History of XBRL

The AICPA has published a History of XBRL, which contains extensive commentary by Charles Hoffman, the inventor of XBRL. It's a good read, and informative and can be downloaded free of charge from this site.

2009-07-25T11:01:00.002-04:00

XBRL Global Update

The XBRL Section of IASC Foundation, directed by Olivier Servais, periodically releases an update outlining events taking place around the world involving XBRL. The report is always comprehensive and always amazing in the amount of XBRL activity taking place in every corner of the globe. The latest version, for June, is posted at the IASB site. It's worth being on your regular reading list.

2009-07-17T13:17:00.002-04:00

Social Media Comes of Age

If you ever doubted that Social Media has come of age, consider this: Twitter is being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize. The reason is the role it played in the recent Iranian unrest. Many will also remember that Twitter played an important role in the US election last fall, when Obama used it effectively during the election.

2009-07-15T09:11:00.002-04:00

Explaining XBRL to CFOs

Research and surveys continue to show that most managers and executives do not have a clear understanding of what XBRL is and what it can do. The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), chief sponsor of XBRL in Canada, just issued a publication to help in addressing this issue. It's a CFO Briefing called "Transition to XBRL", under the auspices of the Canadian Performance Reporting Board. It's available for free download from the CICA Website and is definitely worth a read.

2009-07-15T05:44:00.001-04:00

XBRL videos on Google Video can be very helpful in gaining a quick understanding of what XBRL is all about. Check them out.

They're great.

2009-07-10T14:30:00.001-04:00

Making the Case for Inline XBRL
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.

With 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/.

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.

2009-07-07T04:53:00.002-04:00

Videos of the main stage presentations from the 19th XBRL International Conference, Paris June 23, 2009 are available here.Welcome to XBRL:

2009-07-03T05:53:00.003-04:00

Speed Bumps for new SEC Filers

There are a couple of issues that new filers will encounter under the new SEC rules. These include the fact that the FASB has renumbered its rules through its new codification, which is not reflected in the taxonomies. Also, the Edgar system will not be able to accept filings using the new 2009 US GAAP taxonomy until July 22, 20009. Some consultants are recommending that filers use the 2008 US taxonomy the first year as they are permitted to do. A write up on these speed bumps is found on the CFO website.

2009-07-03T05:13:00.002-04:00

UK Tax Service Going to Compulsory XBRL filing

Effective with year ends of March 31, 2010, Corporate tax returns in the UK will be required to file online using XBRL. The service is putting the final touches on its requirements, and new legislation and regulations have been introduced. The drafts are on the website of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and on this website of Accounting Education. It's a good model for Canada to pursue.

2009-06-28T19:43:00.005-04:00

Canada Brings up the Rear
By Gerald Trites

The International XBRL Conference in Paris ended on June 25 after three days of intensive discussion and informative sessions from governments, regulators, consultants, aggregators, publishers, academics and others. Each year, the XII conferences get richer with content and show amazing progress in the adoption of XBRL around the world.

A Canadian attending the conference is prompted to ask one simple question – Why is Canada so far behind the rest of the world? Don’t we realize that equity markets depend on current data and that much of the rest of the world is now or soon will be able to produce that data in a form that can be read and analyzed by any computer systems; that it can be analyzed with unprecedented speed and depth? That economies have globalized and that the free flow of information is of paramount importance? That we soon will not be able to compete?

We Canadians are stuck in the last vestiges of the Gutenburg era, while the rest of the world is speeding ahead with state-of-the-art technologies. Blame it on governments that lack foresight, or on regulators that feel they need to follow the US – at a safe distance - or on our branch plant mentality. Whatever the reasons, we are badly behind and we will pay a price for that.

At the conference, speakers from the US, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, China, Japan, Belgium and many others spoke of their programs that have, or are about to, involve the implementation of XBRL. David Blaszkowsky, Director of the SEC's Office of Interactive Disclosure in the US, spoke about their new filing requirements.

Ignacio Boixo, coordinator of the XBRL Network of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, spoke about the XBRL implementations of both the COREP (Basel II) and FINREP (IFRS) reporting frameworks which are now used in more than half of the member countries of the European Community.

Speakers from the Netherlands talked about the development of the taxonomy for the Netherlands Taxonomy Project (NTP), which involves a comprehensive adoption of XBRL across the government, so all filers can use XBRL for all their filings with government authorities. The savings from this approach, often referred to as Standard Business Reporting (SBR) will be many millions of Euros.

Paul Madden, the Program Director for Standard Business Reporting (SBR) in Australia, discussed their program, which is broadly similar to the NTP in the Netherlands and involves 12 government agencies, and the development of a single taxonomy for Australian businesses to report to government.

Andy Greener, an Enterprise Architect of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in the UK, gave a compelling presentation on their program to require all UK companies to file their tax returns in XBRL by next year. Companies House in the UK has already received over 100,000 filings in XBRL.

A speaker from the Federal Public Service, Finance in Belgium reported on a corporate tax return taxonomy development project for that country, which will lead to XBRL tax filings in Belgium. Two members of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) told of the implementation of XBRL-based filings by banks to the Reserve Bank.

Mr. Koji Yoshida, head for Disclosure Planning in the Tokyo Stock Exchange Inc., reported on their implementation of XBRL.

There were many others. XBRL is rapidly becoming the standard format for the reporting of financial and business information in stock exchanges, banks, tax departments and other government departments generally around the world.

We need to get moving.

2009-06-25T04:50:00.003-04:00

Bowne has developed a new product to automate the conversion between 2008 and 2009 taxonomies, called Bowne XChanger. This software tool will automatically make technical updates in the XBRL files and provide detailed results as to what previously-used US GAAP and extension taxonomy elements are found in the new 2009 taxonomies. They are using this tool internally to transition their full-service clients, but it is also available on their website for self-tagging issuers. www.bowne.com/xbrl

2009-06-19T08:07:00.002-04:00

XBRL in Paris

The XBRL International Conference is being held in Paris from June 23 to 25. This year, the conference has added an academic track, in which a number of research papers are being presented. The program, which can be found on the XBRL.ORG website, has a wide variety of topics and speakers, covering such areas as taxonomy development, reporting burden reduction, banking supervision, and the impact of the semantic web. The latter, the semantic web is the wave of the future, and there is work under way to incorporate XBRL in it. There has been enough experience with the real world application of XBRL by now to be able to offer up a number of case studies and empirical research projects that will strengthen XBRL for the future. It's worth tracking the conference next week. It will be webcast live for the first time from the XBRL.ORG site.