Yesterday was a big news day for the SEC and XBRL as the long-awaited SEC rule on mandatory XBRL filings was finalized by a vote of 4-1 by the SEC commissioners.
There's a great post on IR Webreport titled “SEC mandates XBRL for financial statements.” IR blogger Dominic Jones covers this thoroughly with a great section on the nuts and bolts of XBRL.
Another great post comes from John Turner on XBRL vendor Corefiling's blog Insight, titled “Mandatory filing Q2 2009”. Turner talks about how this is a big step toward increasing transparency of financial reporting for all investors. Turner concludes his post, “I think this decision today is much bigger than most people realize.”
What is the fuss all about? We believe there are two very significant benefits to using XBRL — transparency and productivity. In fact, the productivity piece may be the most compelling reason to think about XBRL, for even private companies. XBRL has the capability to automate internal and external financial reporting and significantly drive down costs — just the type of innovation we need in this down market. While there is still a lot of work to be done on displaying XBRL formatted data, this mandate will cause more vendors to bring solutions to the XBRL arena.
Check out our XBRL session from Second Life:
Check out a summary of our XBRL session in Second Life. See the archive link on the post.
Also, be sure to listen to our podcasts on XBRL:
- XBRL and non-profits: A good fit?
- The road to XBRL, an interview with one of XBRL's founders, Mike Willis of PWC.
We covered XBRL at last year's MDBIZEXPO and will be featuring it again on June 16 and 17 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Get details here.
Search this blog with “XBRL” to see prior postings and resources on XBRL.
In other news, Bloomberg broke the news of Mary Shapiro as the President-elect Obama's pick as the next SEC Commissioner. Shapiro is chief executive officer of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Prior to that, she was the chief regulator for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Read Bloomberg's story in its entirety.
Does this pave the way for the “merger” of the SEC and CFTC? What impact will that have on the PCAOB? On public company filers? Stay tuned …