On September 4th, the President took another important step toward a more open and transparent government by announcing a new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records. Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of their necessarily confidential nature, the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour or to conduct business will be released. As historic as the President’s announcement is, it is also a good illustration of what is missing from the administration’s technology infrastructure plan – a coordinated approach to providing data standards.

On the surface, this new disclosure of visitor data looks perfectly fine. The data made available in a simple Comma Separated Values (.csv) file is easily downloaded and opened into a spreadsheet for viewing purposes.

Take a step beyond simple viewing, and try to mash up this content to see where the visitor’s list collides with other interest groups and data sources – you begin to get an idea of the complex nature of data mapping. For example, think of mashing up this visitor information with the U.S. SEC filings that include the names and remuneration of executives of publicly traded companies tagged in XBRL.

Better yet, simply try to blog about someone’s visit to the White House and reference a snippet from the .csv content. Then go to Twitter and post a tweet with a link to your blog so you can have bragging rights about being the first to notice some VIP’s visit. If I then repost the information on my blog and one of my readers wants to get back to the source file to verify the facts without some form of metadata and URI associated with the content, there is no path back to the original source. Therefore, there is no validation that the information is accurate. When I repost your information on my blog, I am simply trusting your cutting and pasting skills and trusting that you accurately interpreted the information. This can be a potentially dangerous situation that often leads to a lot of misinformed “noise.”

So far, in the marriage of social networks and open government, there has been a lot of “noise” coming in, but there has been very little done in the way of creating constructive solutions for accurate and trusted citizen participation.

Without the metadata about the newly disclosed visitor content or any other government information, the accuracy with which data is interpreted is jeopardized with each reuse. Without a link back to the source, the authenticity of the content is no longer discoverable. Without this information, it’s all just more “noise” on the web.

Where Does XML Fit in?

XML industry standards bring metadata to the content. Even a simple XML schema and an instance document would have gone a long way to ensure that, regardless of what tool consumed the visitor data (including spreadsheets), the information would always be interpreted in the same manner. Furthermore, the use of an XML industry standard for identity would enable one to leverage existing tools to mash up the content with other data sources. The key benefit of XML is that consuming applications no longer requires someone to reinvent clever ways of mapping and representing complex data, so developers can expend their energies on solving higher level problems that have a greater return.

There are plenty of other examples across federal, state and municipal government agencies that build the case for leveraging XML industry standards to aid in creating greater transparency and to create efficiencies for the agencies themselves.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Recovery.gov and multiple other individual government agency projects have taken strides forward to granting the public access to government data. However, cross-agency conversations are still taking place to get some agreement on common data models for comparing and mashing up information from multiple data sources accurately.

Efforts such as the NIEM XBRL harmonization discussions should be applauded as this combined effort should aid in the accurate mapping of government financial data across agencies. There is still a long way to go before we can start to leverage the really interesting technologies like Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Semantic Web.

While everyone wants to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, designing the technology infrastructure to ensure that it is done in an open, transparent and accurate manner requires a lot of cross-agency collaboration. The administration’s goal should be to ensure that the public can collaborate on the analysis and dissemination of public information across the web in a manner that can be trusted, authenticated and redistributed without imposing a cost burden on the consumers or the producers of that information. That is no small task.

This all leaves me wondering if I am guessing correctly about what was being talked about in the White House on 7/14/2009 at 3:00:00PM and about who was in the room. If my assumptions are right – loosely based on about 22,200 Google hits for Stephen J. Hemsley, who was listed as visiting Aneesh Chopra, for whom there are about 1,170,000 Google hits – I’m guessing a lot of these same data topics were addressed with a slight healthcare twist. But then again, I’m doing the interpretations here and making the free associations, so you’ll just have to trust me.

To add your input to the conversation about improving data access on the web, join us at the Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web on October 5-6, 2009, in Arlington, VA, that is co-organized by W3C and XBRL International, Inc. and hosted by the FDIC.

Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past decade. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane@justsystems.com. You may also follow Diane on Twitter at @XBRLspy.

In the aftermath of banking failures, subprime mortgages, and bailouts across multiple industry sectors, it is a good time to examine the strategies it will take to rebuild public trust in our government and in the world’s financial markets. I believe the answer depends both on what we can do and how we do it.

With all the financial information that corporations were obligated to report because of existing government regulations, how could we not have foreseen this financial disaster? Did we misread the data? Was the information in the reports incorrect? Is there more that should have been required to report?  What was missing were regulations that properly addressed how the information was to be reported. Being specific on the “how” may very well have provided the warnings of the impending disaster rather than finding out how bad it was in the midst of it.

The key to solving the problem is figuring out the best way to publish our data.

A major step towards solving the problem of how to report financial information has been addressed in the latest set of regulations from the U.S. SEC. The regulations now require a growing number of companies to provide financial statement information in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Once all companies that are required to report use this format, analysts will be able to provide more accurate and timely warnings. Rather than using the past rules of demanding information — whether locked inside spreadsheets, forms, PDFs, the web, and other proprietary formats — specifying XBRL makes the data more usable and more easily gathered and analyzed.

If we can’t find the data, if we can’t figure out the problems that may be buried in the mountains of information, and if we haven’t any means to explore the data, we are no better prepared for the next financial crisis.

Creating Compliant Data

To complete the true financial picture of our economy, we need to complete the move to XBRL to ensure that all financial reporting is available as XBRL-tagged content. The government also needs to use XBRL reporting as part of creating a complete picture of the economy. As the bailout legislation, Recovery Act and other massive appropriations that include requirements for public disclosure continue, XBRL reporting could provide an excellent method of measuring the effects to the economy in real-time. Usually economic indicators lag behind because time is needed for surveys and reports to be collected and processed.

The initial impact of new regulations layered on top of existing regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley will be that corporations will be obligated to publish even more data, more frequently. The Obama administration’s effort to push more government data out via Recovery.gov is a good example of the movement to encourage more disclosure. If that information was in XBRL, we could more easily use the data. As the government rolls out its mandate for corporations to submit their financials using XBRL to the U.S. SEC for closer scrutiny and better compliance, they could also take a page from their own book and make all government financial reporting available to the public in XBRL, facilitating a more open national dialogue on our government’s financial health.

As Obama said in his Memorandum on Transparency, “Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.” This information needs to be compiled in a harmonized, compliant fashion across agencies to facilitate its preservation, dissemination, and exploitation and to maximize the research that is derived from it.

Connecting the Data

Like pages on the web, we intuitively know that the public data being posted to sites like SEC.gov and Recovery.gov is interconnected with other sources of data. But discovering the connections when all the data is in disparate formats is next to impossible for most — even  the expert research analysts at times. The government has already started to require XBRL with positive results in terms of access to data, so there should be no reason not to settle on XBRL for all financial reporting by companies and government entities alike. Beyond any specific qualities of XBRL, just by using the same format, reporting and analyzing the reports is faster and more likely to be accurate.

Further transformations like those proposed at recovery.gov (such as a service to transform the data to RDF-tagged semantic data) can allow the financial data in XBRL to be combined with data from other industry and government sectors — transforming the way we explore information.

In addition, the data about the data needs to be discoverable. Just having information in a usable format does little without it being easily accessible. Any kind of data object or concept should be found at a specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so that people can look up specific names, get useful information, and discover more.

As Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, put it, “It is about making links, so that a person or a machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other related data.”

Another consideration is trusting the provenance of the data itself — maintaining the connection to the source of the data whether it’s a filing on the SEC website or a recovery.gov document listing all the grant recipients for bailout funds. If the link (or URL) to the primary data source is lost, the connection and the provenance of the data is no longer assumable and any derived research loses its authenticity. When posting financial information for public consumption, entities enter into an unspoken agreement to maintain those links with the consumers. As more and more data is available online, the long-term stability of government sites and the continued maintenance of links must be guaranteed. The links are the mechanisms that will enable us to trace back to the sources and link us to the authoritative literature; whether that content is a Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) ruling, a Senate Bill allocating billions of bailout dollars, or the financial data related to an entity’s compliance with these rules and regulations.

If governments and corporations publish financial information using harmonized data standards and ensure that relevant links are maintained and accessible, this will go a long way to improve finding the location of relevant data.  Public scrutiny will diminish, and we will again trust the financial markets and the agencies that regulate them.

Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past nine years. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane@justsystems.com.

About JustSystems and XBRL

Along with the SEC, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation, XBRL International, and many other organizations worldwide, JustSystems has been aggressively supporting the development of the XBRL standard and integrating the interactive data format into its xfy platform. JustSystems’ software solutions work with XBRL to enable a richer way of working with and utilizing information, leveraging our technology around information search and retrieval, semantics, document management, and data integration. To learn more about how to accelerate the creation, quality, and consistency of the financial content that your organization produces and consumes today or to participate in the JustSystems beta program, please visit http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl_blog/.

As chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, Kundra raised the bar by making government data more readily accessible to its residents, leveraging pre-existing Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook and YouTube.

Federal agencies are now banding together to plan for how they are going to provide this information in an open, standardized manner that enables citizens to efficiently and accurately mine data, make comparisons, and perform analytics across all government sectors.

All this accessible data sounds well and good until you start looking at it from a developer’s point of view — there is currently little or no uniformity across government agencies for reporting granular federal financial data. With billions of dollars being funneled in grants, loans, and loan guarantees, there needs to be a standard ‘open’ format and shared re-usable taxonomy for both applications and reporting.

What Can We Anticipate from Kundra?

While Kundra’s announcement caused quite a stir in the technology sector, it still remains to be seen if he will have the authority to mandate change or if he will just be a technology advisor to Obama. His role may be limited to making technology recommendations which then have to be adopted into individual agency policies instead of presenting a common technology policy for the government as a whole.

One can only hope that one of Kundra’s first recommendations includes leveraging what has become the de facto global financial reporting open standard — XBRL — to tag and track the billions of Recovery Act dollars. The Obama Administration has committed to enabling an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

Kundra will have to look no further than to the U.S. SEC’s use of RSS feeds and FTP sites to post the recent filings as XBRL. The SEC’s bold move enabled developers to build applications to consume and analyze the data in almost real-time with levels of data accuracy and granularity that could never before be achieved with screen-scraping from untagged data or PDF formats. Previously, the information was only available in normalized data feeds from pay-per-view data aggregators. In another encouraging example and move towards transparency from China, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) recently announced that it has rolled out a platform enabling the download of listed companies’ information tagged with XBRL. As the global financial community moves to free up data in a more accessible manner, the time is now for the U.S. federal government to take similar actions.

It remains to be seen if XBRL will be adopted to track the disbursement and use of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, enabling more effective regulation and providing investors consistent, comparable reporting on the existing pool of securitized assets. Hopefully, Kundra will be listening when XBRL-US presents its report to the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in a hearing today in the U.S. Congress on “Assessing Treasury’s Efforts at Preventing Waste and Abuse of TARP Funds.” Yet another opportunity to leverage open standards to aid in federal transparency efforts.

In a recent memorandum, the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Director, Peter Orszag, describes a planned May 5^th launch of a series of Award Transaction Data Feeds. All federal agencies will now be required to provide all Recovery Act assistance transactions in the standard format currently provided to USASpending.gov. In the memo, Orszag placed a high priority on delivering an “accurate display” of information related to the Recovery Act on Recovery.gov. Federal agencies are now scrambling to ensure they comply and that all reporting related to Recovery Act funding is complete and accurate.

It’s not a “window to the federal data” that will allow developers to leverage and create valuable applications, but rather access to the raw data itself, preferably with open standards-based tags from a shared common federal taxonomy of terms.

We’re tired of screen-scrapping and trying to data map disparate data sources across federal government agencies. Hopefully federal agencies like the OMB will listen to Kundra and take a page from Facebook and the iPhone and create an open standards-based platform. Then, the application developers will come in droves.

Building an app is easy when you don’t have to worry about shifting data sources, proprietary platforms, and an ever-changing myriad of web services.

Creating a Comprehensive Plan

The key to the success of this plan is to ensure that there is some agreement across all federal agencies that defines a shared common ‘open’ data standard and identifies how deeply they are willing to push the tagging of data gathered into the collection processes for Recovery Act funding applications and into the financial reporting between the federal, state, and local agencies who are to be the recipients of the Recovery Act funds. Currently, the plan is to only go one level deep — the federal agency will require recipient reporting only from the primary agency receiving the funds.

For instance, a grant could be given from the Federal government to State A, which then gives a sub grant to City B (within State A), which hires a contractor to construct a bridge, which then hires a subcontractor to supply the concrete. In this case, State A is the prime recipient and would be required to report the sub grant to City B. However, City B does not have any specific reporting obligations — nor does the contractor or subcontractor — for the purposes of reporting to the Recovery.gov website.

In Spain, XBRL has been used right down to the municipal level for the reporting and monitoring of Local Government Budget Reporting; there’s no reason not to encourage all levels of government agencies to increase information sharing.

Kundra’s Potential Impact on XBRL

Kundra could really drive XBRL forward by insisting that all the data, right down to actual recipients, be made available as long as that data did not breach privacy and security of individuals. As accounting packages and ERP vendors like SAP are all adding XBRL export functionality to their offerings to facilitate SEC filings, it would be a natural next step to get XBRL-tagged reports all the way down to the contractor and sub-contractor levels.

Obama’s team should really take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to breakdown the governmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. The Dutch and Australian governments recognized the interdependent nature of government agencies and the increased need for information-sharing via a standards-based approach and are relying heavily on the XBRL standard in their eGov efforts to give their countries an extra edge of efficiency.

Kundra should court developers by providing an open standards-based, open source tool chain, giving examples and explaining in clear language how to create applications in the same manner that Apple and Facebook have done. If built on the solid open data standard foundation laid by U.S. SEC and the XBRL consortium, this should ensure — as long as data is free and open — that applications will flourish and shine some long-awaited sunlight on government spending.

Empower the world’s developers to make the Recover.gov data more useful and understandable for users rather than creating reliance on Federal government contractors to develop more websites for displaying data. Developers everywhere are eager to create meaningful applications that will connect users to financial data and solve real-world problems. Free the data, and the application developers will follow.

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Diane Mueller has been actively involved in the development efforts of the XBRL standard for the past nine years. She is the Canadian representative to the XBRL International Steering Committee, serves as Vice Chair of that body, and chairs the XBRL Working Groups on Rendering and Software Interoperability. She currently serves as vice president of XBRL development at JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://www.justsystems.com, and contact Diane at diane@justsystems.com.

About JustSystems and XBRL

Along with the SEC, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation, XBRL International, and many other organizations worldwide, JustSystems has been aggressively supporting the development of the XBRL standard and integrating the interactive data format into its xfy platform. JustSystems’ software solutions work with XBRL to enable a richer way of working with and utilizing information, leveraging our technology around information search and retrieval, semantics, document management, and data integration. To learn more about how to accelerate the creation, quality, and consistency of the financial content that your organization produces and consumes today or to participate in the JustSystems beta program, please visit http://na.justsystems.com/xbrl_blog/.

XML Developers are surely rejoicing with Altova’s recent announcement of XBRL support. By adding XBRL functionality into Altova’s ever popular suite of development tools of XMLSpy, Mapforce and StyleVision, an army of XML developers will hopefully now be unleashed and eased into developing XBRL-aware applications without having to leave the comfort of their beloved XML tools. This announcement should help spur further mainstreaming of the XBRL standard. The timing is right with the US SEC Mandate fast approaching and numerous public companies looking for help to create re-usable corporate filings workflows…

Read more: http://xbrlspy.org/altova_brings_xbrl_to_mainstream_for_xml_developers

In an article on Law360.com entitled “XBRL Filings To Become Mandatory This June“, the author, Jesse Greenspan takes an interesting point of view in saying that the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s XBRL initiatives were an attempt to empower amateur analysts. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard XBRL described in this manner which at first glance might seems to minimize the impact that XBRL is expected to have across the entire Financial Reporting Supply chain. It would be nice to think that the SEC would spend 59 million dollars to modernize the EDGAR filing system just so amateur analysts could have a field day and uncover the next bubble  – but in reality, the SEC is also being self-serving as there is no way that the current system could continue in place without such an XBRL-enhanced modernization effort…

Read more: http://xbrlspy.org/xbrl_an_attempt_to_empower_amateur_analysts

Last week’s recommendation from the Expert Panel on Securities Regulation regarding the formation of a national securities regulator for Canada has been a long time coming. The Expert Panel was led by former federal cabinet minister Thomas Hockin. About 40 years of prior debate and research preceded this panel’s 11 months of deliberations which culminated in a forgone conclusion that a single, national securities regulator would be more efficient and effective than the current 13 provincial securities regulatory organizations. Today, Canada is the only Group of Seven (G7) member without a single national securities watchdog. Even with this new recommendation, it is naive to think that the provincial regulators will go quietly into the night; the Expert Panel’s recommendation to keep existing staff in place and simply change the reporting lines may appease most provinces during the transition period. In the coming months, we?ll watch the Obama administration take over the reins on the U.S. SEC’s 21st Century Disclosure Initiative; the U.S. blueprint for a modernized disclosure system based on interactive data, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). We’ll also see the Dutch and Australian governments quietly roll out their own financial data standardization and infrastructure modernization efforts to unify across government information silos. The time has come for Canada to join the modern era, and a move to a single regulatory body is certainly a step in the right direction and bodes well for the advancement of significant regulatory standards like XBRL.

Next Steps for Canada

Unifying the 13 provincial securities regulators will be a good first step towards streamlining the capital markets regulators and giving Canada an economy of scale for modernizing infrastructure and the underpinnings of Canadian regulatory processes. The next step is to get the Harper government to fund the much needed overhaul and modernization of the regulatory system. President Obama’s upcoming visit to Canada would be a good time for the Harper government to enter discussions with the U.S. about using XBRL for the filings process to:

• gain overall efficiencies by leveraging global standards,
• aid in the transparency of financial data,
• help mitigate risks in the regulator process; and
• improve the accuracy and quality of the financial data being reported.

Harper’s Finance team should also take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to break down governmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. This SBR approach relies heavily on XBRL because the Dutch and Australian governments have recognized the interdependent nature of government agencies and the increased need for information sharing via a standards-based approach. With XBRL projects underway across the globe, it doesn’t take a genius to see the writing on the wall for more cross-agency, cross-jurisdictional, cross-border cooperation and a standards-based approach are needed to manage the risks that the current global financial crisis has highlighted.

About XBRL

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a royalty-free, open specification for software that uses XML data tags to describe financial information for public and private companies and other organizations. XBRL benefits all members of the financial information supply chain by utilizing a standards-based method with which users can prepare, publish in a variety of formats, exchange and analyze financial statements and the information they contain. XBRL International is a non-profit consortium of approximately 500 organizations worldwide working together to build the XBRL language and promote and support its adoption. XBRL International is responsible for the technical XBRL specification and each country-specific jurisdiction works to facilitate the development and adoption of local XBRL taxonomies, or dictionaries, consistent with accounting, regulatory, and market standards and practices.

About XBRL Canada

XBRL Canada is the non-profit consortium for XML business reporting standards in Canada and is a jurisdiction of XBRL International. It represents the business information supply chain, including accounting firms, software companies, financial databases, financial printers and government agencies. To join or learn more about XBRL in Canada, please visit us at http://www.xbrl.ca

Original article: http://www.xbrlspy.org/canadian_move_to_single_national_securities_regulator_key_to_restoring_investor_confidence

by Diane Mueller

Obama’s technology-savvy election team worked very effectively to leverage a new world order of YouTube, social networking, and blogging tools to promote his agenda, connect with a nation of voters, and raise campaign funds. But does he really know what it’s going to take to overhaul and connect all the disparate government information systems that the U.S. Federal bureaucracy has built up over the past 200 years? He has certainly raised hopes and set expectations high for both the technology and financial sectors.

Obama’s Finance Team Appointments: A Great First Step

Even though SEC Chairman Christopher Cox has been criticized for not paying enough attention to details of the subprime meltdown and other fiascos like the Madoff Ponzi scheme, hopefully his legacy around interactive data (XBRL) and EDGAR modernization will still be preserved. All signs are good so far.

Obama’s selection of Mary Schapiro to spearhead the SEC makes sense. As head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), her insider’s knowledge of the SEC along with her understanding of the need for cross-agency, cross-jurisdictional and cross-borders cooperation is encouraging. In speeches post 9/11, Schapiro talked a good game about applying large doses of technological creativity to resolve the issues that were then plaguing the financial markets and the regulatory institutions. If she brings those ideas and enthusiasm to the SEC and other bastions of federal regulation to break down the information silos across government agencies, markets, and borders, we should be in good shape with XBRL advancement.

Shapiro will also be working with Gary Gensler, former undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance and Obama’s pick to head up the Commodity Futures Trade Commission. You can bet they will be working closely together as both agencies have come under severe criticism in the wake of the financial meltdown. Suggestions of a proposed merger of the two agencies may eventually leave one of them without a job.

In addition, Obama also plans to appoint a new cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to upgrade government computer systems. He wants the nation’s first CTO to “ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the 21st century.” The future CTO has the opportunity to be really instrumental in modernizing financial regulatory processes like XBRL by:

• promoting cross-agency cooperation on standards-based approaches to create a common taxonomy for information sharing;
• creating a single sign-on world for all government online activities; and
• working across traditional jurisdictional boundaries to break the federal, state, and municipal information-sharing barriers so that our enforcement agencies can truly share information efficiently and securely.

Moving Forward with Interactive Data aka XBRL

As Obama assembles his financial team, there is excitement about his emphasis on leveraging technology to gain efficiencies in other areas of government. For example, he’s pledged to invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to implement standards-based electronic health information systems. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come. This new finance team can restore confidence by leading and accelerating the current federal modernization efforts underway that are using standards-based XBRL technology to help resolve this latest series of disasters plaguing the financial markets and regulatory institutions.

Obama’s team should also take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to breakdown the governmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. This SBR approach relies heavily on XBRL technology, or “interactive data,” as Chairman Cox likes to call it. The Dutch and Australian governments have recognized the interdependent nature of government agencies and the increased need for information-sharing via a standards-based approach. Targeting financial reporting early, as the SEC has, is a good first step and should be continued. With XBRL projects underway at both the FDIC and the SEC, it doesn’t take a genius to see the writing is on the wall — more cross-agency cooperation and a standards-based approach is needed to drive XBRL forward during the Obama administration.

Beyond securities regulation, federal financial management could also use a creative dose of technology. Obama’s new CTO should support the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the overall government accounting community in their efforts to prepare consolidated financial statements and to modernize the processes that account for and reconcile intra-governmental activity and balances between federal agencies. Sharing a common data dictionary of all financial terms that can be used across the public sector will streamline financial statements submitted to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and simplify reporting to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This information-sharing need not stop at the federal level — pilot XBRL projects in Nevada and Oregon point to a growing awareness of the potential to cross state and municipal borders too.

As Chairman Cox recently pointed out, “Paper and financial representations of paper can’t keep pace with financial engineering and digital capital markets.” Hindsight is everything, and perhaps if interactive data had been in place, the Madoff fiasco and the subprime mortgage crisis might have been averted or at least detected sooner.

XBRL technology can help facilitate the detection of such schemes, streamline audit and accounting processes, and help regulators put early warning systems in place. There is lack of confidence in today’s market, and the federal government needs to focus on modernizing their infrastructure to build transparency. Migrating financial information to a standards-based XML format will enable faster and more accurate data analysis.

Let’s hope that the six degrees of separation from the Madoff scandal doesn’t touch any of Obama’s nominees and that they all pass the Senate confirmation hearings quickly. Then we can all get back to the important standards development work at hand and provide support for their efforts to restore confidence in our financial market.

Original article: http://www.xbrlspy.org/will_obama039s_technology_push_extend_to_financial_regulators

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission mandate of XBRL is great news! It’s a triumph for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who played a pivotal role in ensuring the modernization of IT infrastructure of the EDGAR filing system based on XBRL — an initiative that may be a his most lasting legacy and a final feather in his cap.

And, of course, the SEC’s XBRL mandate is great news for the financial community at large. XBRL holds the promise of revolutionizing business reporting on a global scale, dramatically improving the relationship between people, processes, accounting standards, and financial information. How? By ensuring that a company’s financial reporting is always an authoritative reflection of the latest version of the truth within the enterprise.

XBRL lets reviewers look at financial data in a highly interactive format that is much more accessible by various line-of-business applications and composite applications. Documents empowered with XBRL are more richly described and can be consumed much more readily by applications such as risk management, financial analysis, and audit.

Chairman Cox puts the matter plainly when he says that XBRL “means allowing average Americans the ability to view exactly the financial information that they want. We are on a campaign to liberate business and financial information that…is currently trapped inside dense documents.”. With adoption of this mandate, the SEC moves from document disclosure to data disclosure improving searchablity and accessibility. XBRL makes the rendering.of financial data in its various forms more easily accessible to investors.

XBRL is already mandated for financial filings in multiple jurisdictions worldwide, so the SEC mandate simply moves the U.S. into global alignment with other regulators. Also, the SEC mandate, combined with the trend toward the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), opens the possibility for true global comparability of financial documents.

To date, the potential for XBRL remains largely unexplored due to the gap between worker knowledge and access to new services that can view, consume, and work with this new format. Financial documents still remain largely focused on unstructured and disconnected data built and viewed with non-XBRL aware applications.

Going forward, however, the SEC announcement in combination with new advances in XBRL data-centric documents-based technology, management, search capabilities and dynamic content enrichment offer a promising lifeline to help solve XBRL’s tenuous relationship with people and task-oriented knowledge. One thing is for sure — XBRL is not going away, so it is time for organizations to get comfortable with the standard and create a solid plan for adoption.

Original article: http://www.xbrlspy.org/xbrl_victory_sec_mandate_of_xbrl_extends_benefits_of_financial_standards