XBRL the word on everyone's lips

Stuart Corner
Monday, 19 May 2008 12:35

IT Industry - Market

XBRL - eXtensible Business Reporting Language - which provides a standardised approach to tagging the financial information in company reports is set to become a term as well known as HTML and GAAP, according to Deloitte's 2008 Technology Predictions.

XBRL enables a faster, easier reporting and analysis of financial data across a single company or across multiple companies as the process is more readily automated. Research by Deloitte has shown that XBRL reduces processing time of financial statement information by 86 percent.

According to Deloitte's lead technology partner, Jenny Wilson, one of the biggest drivers of XBRL is the push for adoption from governments and financial regulators of the world's leading economies. Governments and their financial authorities are likely to push for XBRL's adoption due to the potential benefits in terms of productivity, efficiency and greater transparency.

For example, the technology could enable greater automation in all areas of tax including payroll taxes, corporate income tax, value-added tax and customs duties. The US SEC directly attributed its discovery of billions of dollars-worth of backdated share options to the conversion of existing submissions into machine readable files.

In Australia adoption of XBRL is being lead by the federal government's Department of Treasury and its Standard Business Reporting Programme. At the beginning of 2008, listed companies in China were already providing data in machine readable XBRL format for quarterly, half yearly and annual reports. In the second quarter of 2008, XBRL submissions for all public companies in Japan will become mandatory.

In the United States, by year-end 2007, at least 40 companies, with a combined turnover of $2 trillion, had already signed up for a pilot scheme for XBRL filing and mandatory filing appeared imminent: in November 2007 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it was preparing a proposal to make XBRL submission mandatory.

In South Korea, a voluntary XBRL filing scheme, launched in October 2007, had been taken up by 30 companies by the following month. The UK Government has also announced that it plans to make XBRL obligatory by 2011.

For investors, the major benefit of having machine readable accounts would be quicker analysis, Deloittes says. "An investor evaluating mutual funds would be able to compare a fund's strategies, costs, risks and returns at the click of a button. Today, the investor would probably have to pore through each fund's individual reports."