XBRL: New Structure and Price of Information Focus of Day 1
By: Paul Wilkinson
Tags: Journalism, Business, Regulation, Finance, Technology

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit kicked off Tuesday afternoon with experts agreeing about the quality of the first 42 mandatory U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and demonstrating palpable ambition for the future of free financial information.

Well, mostly free.

Free (as in libre) accounting information in new SEC filings was Topic A, but a new fee to view new interpretations and guidance created by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in its massive project to codify U.S. GAAP was soon Topic B. FASB’s “basic view” of its codification is free (as in gratis) to visitors to its Web site, but the price to enjoy “full functionality and advanced navigation” on FASB’s Web site is $850.

FASB’s codification has added more references to literature than are contained in early versions of the XBRL U.S. GAAP taxonomies, but those references should be quickly incorporated into taxonomy updates. Workshop participants didn’t say so, but the $850 fee to access those references may be a non-trivial barrier to entry to at least some software developers looking to use FASB’s Web site to help them develop innovative ways to improve financial reporting.

Whether $850 is fair to retail investors seeking to understand financial statements of companies in which they invest — or software designers who might create tools to help investors — is up to the SEC, which oversees FASB. The free to users (as in gratis) XBRL-tagged GAAP information itself, flowing to investors via the SEC and company Web sites, may be more useful to investors than $850 worth of accounting theory. (Academics get FASB’s professional view for free.)

Campbell Pryde, XBRL US Chief Standards Officer, said a “codification extension” to align U.S. GAAP data tags with FASB’s new GAAP codification would be released in early August.

Software providers who want to support the codification will be able to do so either by referencing the codification extension taxonomy on the XBRL US Web site or by incorporating the extension taxonomy into their own software, Pryde said.

New data tags to deal with new accounting policies are on their way, he said, including one to report fair market value with respect to “transactions that are not orderly.” (Who knew that XBRL’s order would be used to bring transparency to — er — disorder?)

Within a few years, taxonomy development will make the need for companies to create custom SEC filing tags “very, very rare,” Pryde said.

XBRL US is also developing tools to validate notes disclosure in anticipation of the requirement for detailed notes tagging next year and data tags to automate the global reporting of at least 55 corporate actions and automatically translate those actions into international standards, helping put capital to its highest and best uses around the world. XBRL US plans to finish public review of the corporate actions taxonomy in May 2010 and publish the taxonomy the following month.

Pryde also showed a taxonomy for mortgage backed securities to allow loan information now posted as unstructured ASCII and HTML on the SEC’s disclosure site to be structured in XBRL format analogous to GAAP filings.

Also on Tuesday, Makoto Koizumi, Senior Consultant to Fujitsu Research Institute, gave an overview of Japan’s adoption of the XBRL standard for capital market, tax, and financial reporting. Fujitsu maintains Japan’s XBRL taxonomies under contract to the Japan’s Financial Services Agency.

A group of XBRL US interns from Japan and Korea presented projects including the development of a tool to evaluate the use of custom data tags by SEC filers and to identify tags that are unnecessary because they aren’t being used by filers. XBRL US intends to make the tool freely available, Pryde said. Another intern project on corporate actions noted gaps in data standards and problems caused by the reporting of corporate actions in unstructured format.