As this morning's Wall Street Journal reports:
About 500 of the largest public companies in the U.S. would be required to "tag" data in financial reports starting this year, with smaller companies following over the next two years, under a proposal floated this week by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The proposal, which the SEC approved 3-0, calls for large public companies that use U.S. accounting to electronically tag financial data starting with reports covering periods that end on or after Dec. 15. The smallest companies and those that use international accounting would come under the SEC's data-tagging requirement beginning in late 2010.
Data-tagging technology uses software called XBRL -- which stands for "extensible business reporting language" -- to code individual bits of information, such as revenue, making it easy to find and compare results across companies or time periods.
This is good news for those of us pushing for greater disclosure of information on intangible assets (admittedly a small step). XBRL can be used to tag both quantitative and qualitative information. So it creates a framework for easily identifying information - including information on intangibles.
Now the task is to make sure that intangibles are a routine part of that framework.
(For more on XBRL, see the recent report by the AICPA's Assurance Services Executive Committee: The Shifting Paradigm in Business Reporting and Oversight.)
Leave a comment