Friday, May 11, 2012

This Week in XBRL: The DATA Act Heads to the Senate


The DATA Act first made headlines in June of 2011 and has stayed at the top of the financial industry’s watch list ever since. The Act is still waiting for Senate approval, but XBRL supporters are already campaigning to get the reporting language adopted by the federal government.

“The bill doesn’t mandate XBRL as the medium for gathering and reporting data,” say Hitachi Data Interactive , “but it instructs the Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Commission, to be formed by the bill, to incorporate existing nonproprietary standards such as XBRL if it’s practical to do so.”

The DATA Act was quickly approved by the House of Representatives, largely due to a high-profile scandal in which millions of dollars was wasted on an over-the-top Las Vegas conference. The public outcry for federal financial transparency has only increased since 2011, and few doubt the success of the DATA Act bill.

But why is XBRL a good choice for these federal financial reports? Hitachi Data Interactive has more:

[Campbell Pryde, of the XBRL US Consortium] also assured the House knows how free and open XBRL is, and that it was developed specifically to provide the kind of reporting of financial and performance-related information that the DATA Act seeks to establish. “The ability of XBRL to enable greater standardization means that government agencies and the entities reporting to them can leverage the same software and infrastructure from agency to agency, and even more importantly, they can avail themselves of the tools already available on the market today,” he wrote to the House to support the measure. “XBRL is a low-cost solution that needs no further development and can leverage existing market tools, infrastructure and expertise.
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Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.

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