Dodd-Frank bill leaves out XBRL

The historic Dodd-Frank financial reform bill was notable in the audit community for an interesting omission: The final bill did not include a requirement ordering regulators to distribute financial industry filings in a standard electronic format, such as Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

Companies are now transitioning to XBRL to file financial reports. But there are many other applications as well. The intuitive appeal of using XBRL for financial disclosure is pretty obvious; the new law requires a lot of new data to be disclosed and the only way to make sense of it all is to render it in a format suitable for analysis, distribution and presentation, either by regulators or third parties or even citizens.

The proposal on the House side would have imposed the format on hedge funds, credit rating agencies, the SEC and others. Crowd-sourcing might be a good idea in this regard. The last thing you want is for the new law to generate boatloads of data that can't be analyzed. What good what it be. But some on the Senate side were concerned that such a requirement would simply add costs to an already costly process. So they removed the provision from the final bill. The main proponent of the idea, Rep. Darrell Issa, will likely try again.

For more:
- here's an article from nextgov

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