The SEC voted yesterday to make XBRL the official standard for communicating business and financial information.  As XBRL Blog Magazine reports, the mandate comes out of a roundtable held by the SEC, and might require compliance for companies reporting as early as June 2009.

We noted over the summer in a post on XBRL that in a June survey by Compliance Week, 55% of 236 financial reporting executives had started researching XBRL or were not aware of the subject at all, and less than 20% of respondents had anybody on staff considered to be an XBRL expert.  This SEC mandate will demand a short learning curve for the first half of 2009; the transition might be challenging but the payoff will be considerable.  As we wrote in that earlier post, “Long-term benefits are likely to be realized by those businesses that are willing and able to embrace the technological change that XBRL will bring about, such as easier and faster access to competitive information and knowledge.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Reporting standards, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.