XBRL International (XII) is a standards organization currently funded by a membership model, with revenue coming from the jurisdictions and conferences. This was a fine model when the XBRL standard was young and large accounting firms and the AICPA saw the benefits from being generous with their support. Conferences were seen as a moneymaker for XBRL International, and funding was adequate to support a startup standard. XII goals were clearly definable, and “easy” to achieve, which also limited costs.

Since then the model has grown old and revenue growth has been constrained, and with each passing conference, there are quiet conversations about “how do we change the model, because this one isn’t working”.

I offer some background and a number of recommendations.

Some time ago I wrote about my concerns that there were not enough XBRL experts. That generated some interesting discussion, and led to one of the questions that I put to David Blaszkowsky, Director of the SECs Office of Interactive Data (OID). In a wide ranging conversation, more of which will be included in other posts, we talked specifically about the issue. As this conversation carried on from the previous, readers should accept that the standard disclaimer is still in place.

Imagine a world in which 17,000 annual budget settlements were being handled manually each year. The time and cost involved, not to mention the error rates, would be enough to challenge any organization. In fact, you’d expect something like this to have been automated years ago.

Earlier last week I had the pleasure of spending some time (over the phone) with David Blaszkowsky, Director of the SEC’s Office of Interactive Disclosure. We covered a number of issues, too much in fact to put into a single article, so there will be more from David over the coming weeks.

The Office of Interactive Disclosure (OID) carries the heavy responsibility of implementing the SEC’s Interactive Data rules for GAAP for public companies, for mutual funds and for ratings (links and names), and in the minds of many observers of XBRL’s progress around the world, holds the key to demonstrating the real value for XBRL for public financial reporting generally…

Many years ago when I worked for the (then) largest computer company on the planet, I learned a phrase that probably helped them become the largest computer company on the planet: “Never confuse sell with install”.

Well well well… Some sense at last, with the FAF becoming responsible for maintenance of the US GAAP taxonomy. From the very beginning of the process, the FAF (Financial Accounting Foundation and parent of the FASB, the Financial Accounting Standards Board) was expected to be involved in the development of the taxonomy, but for reasons that I’ll not go into, the FAF did not seem to be fully engaged.

I have been warning that Detailed Tagging under the SEC program (also known as “Level 4 tagging”) will be significantly more burdensome for reporting companies. I have gone so far as to ask if this will be the “new SOX” in effort. Now a number of vendors are beginning to echo that concern, although none of them will use the “new SOX” expression. the SEC says they are watching closely, and looking for “best practices”.

There has been a lot of discussion suggesting that if there had been an XBRL taxonomy for MBSs and other CDOs (etc) and a taxonomy for government stimulus spending, that somehow the next crisis can either be averted or reduced – that the lack of transparency was a cause of the last crisis, and will contribute to the next.

The SEC’s original estimate of 125 hours for the face financials seems well in line with the results in the survey. The interesting thing is that the SEC estimates were based on actual participants in the Voluntary Filing Program. So it appears that when the SEC relies on the experience of real companies to estimate the costs, they got it pretty close (the time effort at least).

For years now (well, the past two to three years) the assumed wisdom has been that the creation of a set of XBRL documents for filling with the SEC would require between 40 to 80 person hours. Lately the figure of 30 to 50 has been used, with “10% taking more than 80 hours”.