SEC completes XBRL taxonomy
Sep 25, 2007
Chairman Cox working on a schedule for making the tagging of financial statements mandatory
NEW YORK -- SEC chairman Christopher Cox and XBRL developers appeared together near Wall Street today to announce the completion of all work on writing data tags for US GAAP.
The taxonomy defines some 12,000 accounting terms in extensible business reporting language (XBRL), the computer language that Cox says will make financial reporting and analysis much easier and cheaper.
Cox said the completion of the taxonomy is the penultimate step in the American XBRL project. 'We're not here to announce a moon landing,' he said. 'But we're at the plant, rolling out the Saturn rocket that's going to get us there.'
At the ceremony, Mark Bolgiano, president and CEO of XBRL-US, presented Cox with a secure digital (SD) card containing the tags, noting that they used up just 1 percent of the available memory. Cox said he wanted every public company to obtain one.
'You can slide it into your laptop and use it alongside your current processes as you prepare your calendar 2007 filings or your filings for the fourth quarter of 2007,' Cox said. 'XBRL-US and our accounting staff will be happy to assist you as you work with these new data tags.'
The companies participating in the SEC’s voluntary XBRL filing program, now numbering over 40, did the hard part in helping the XBRL developers work out the tagging system for all the elements of their financial statements. But now other companies, which have been slow on the uptake, will have 'shelf-ready stuff available for them,' Cox said.
Sunir Kapoor, CEO of software developer UBmatrix, has produced report-building tools that are add-ons to Microsoft Excel to map financial statements to the GAAP taxonomy and to create customized tags through extensions. While the need for customization is to be expected since each company will have its own peculiarities, there's also a push to get companies reporting to a standard. 'If you had carte blanche, then you'd lose the comparability which is one of the main benefits of XBRL,' Kapoor says.
UBMatrix tested the tools with IBM, which is now filing in XBRL. 'Our motivation in working with IBM was to get a real-world understanding of the work flows and processes that the software needs to support to make these filings,' he says.
The final version of the taxonomy will be posted on the internet by December 5. Cox also said he has asked seven different offices within the SEC to work on recommendations and a schedule for making reporting in XBRL mandatory.
By Anna Snider