XBRLSpy - Accelerate Compliance with XML Today

HR 2146: DATA Act Status Watch

Front Page — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:37:17 +0000

Link to: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr2146

Are You Certifiable? XBRL Online Training and Examination program launched

Front Page — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:52:05 +0000

XBRL International announce that its now offering a XBRL Foundation Certificate online training and examination program is now available. The program covers a broad range of topics including a comparison of business reporting methods, the business requirements that drove the development of the XBRL Specification, the general architecture of XBRL, the specification’s main components and the basics of modeling for XBRL taxonomy development.

It's an excellent way to show your employers just how XBRL savvy you are and earn some respect for all those angle brackets and taxonomies you've been studying!

The XBRL Foundation Certification is a product of the expertise and knowledge of a dedicated group of highly experienced experts from across the XBRL Community who volunteered and donated their time and expertise to create this excellent course in partnership with Business Reporting Advisory Group (BRAG) and ITpreneurs.

For more information, please visit http://www.xbrl.org/foundations_certificate

OMG Webcast: Towards a Sustainable, Data Standards Driven Approach to Financial Reform

Front Page — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:06:21 +0000

Don't miss OMG and EDM Council Joint Working Group Meetings and Webcast: Towards a Sustainable, Data Standards Driven Approach to Financial Reform

What: A two day dialogue between standards organizations and regulators (with a US focus) on financial reform and the role of standards
When: 22 March 8:45-5 EDT; 23 March 9 - 5 EDT
Who: Object Management Group, Enterprise Data Management Council, XBRL, ISO TC 68 (ISO 20022) and others
Where: Arlington, VA and webcast

Webcast information:
Visual: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/citiglobalweb/join?id=6WDF7P&role=attend
Audio - see detail below for local call in numbers;
US Toll free: +1 (877) 716-6484
US/international Toll: +1 (678) 224-7890
Participant code: 8688481

SXSW XBRL Panel: Power to the People: Regulating Big Business

Front Page — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:02:19 +0000

If you are at SXSW, be sure not to miss this panel: Power to the People: Regulating Big Business After being witness to a multitude of massive corporate accounting scandals, the world has been forced to re-evaluate almost every area of how business is conducted. A new day is dawning in the world of information, and the people are demanding more visibility into the everyday operations of companies and governments. In order to pacify the public outcry for increased knowledge, regulatory controls such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Base III have been enacted. In addition, regulatory agencies like the SEC are rapidly embracing new approaches to providing the public with information and data through the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The SEC and other governing bodies have recognized that the democratization of corporate and government data, through the use of XBRL, will guarantee a higher level of transparency and usability. Now like never before, transparency is allowing for a shift of power from corporations to the people. Because information is easily available for anyone to download for free, analysis and comparisons between the big guys can be done on a large assortment of public data. This information revolution will no longer allow companies to operate in secrecy and will provide people with the data they need to avoid future bailouts and economic turmoil. Panelists include: Michele Leder, Gary Thomson, Jordan Woodward & Eric Cohen http://www.disruptivedata.com/

Upcoming Webinar: 10 Myths about Inline XBRL (iXBRL) sponsored by MetaMoji

Front Page — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:26:21 +0000

MetaMoji is pleased to announce the upcoming webinar entitled 10 Myths about Inline XBRL (iXBRL). There's something about XBRL, particularly the inline XBRL apoach to publishing financial information, that has captured people's imagination. Inline XBRL has become a new hope for solving a multitude of complex issues involved in the financial information supply chain, by individuals and organizations alike. Whether you are a financial analyst, accounts preparer, or developer, this webcast will offer guidance to properly engage the new inline XBRL ecosystem. Please join Metamoji's Principal Advisor (and chair of the XBRL International Technical Working Group) Diane Mueller, who will describe how make the most of inline XBRL and navigate the XBRL terrain.

This webinar is taking place on: November 5th 2010 @ 4pm UK (12pm EST, 9am PST).

Registrations can be made here
or at http://bit.ly/cjma4N

CONTACT DETAILS

Ben Walshaw MetaMoji Corporation
Phone: +44 (0)203 286
ben@metamoji.com

Where content meets code: U.S. SEC mandates, Python and financial content

Front Page — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:15:27 +0000

June 30, 2010 — 7:23am ET | By Ron Miller a Guest Post by Diane Mueller ( reposted from FierceContentManagement.com )

These are interesting times for Financial Content providers and consumers. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) put the first stake in the ground during the Cox administration when they mandated the use of XBRL and began in stages to require large public companies to submit XBRL-tagged documents to the SEC, turning corporate financial statements into more easily searchable and comparable documents.

Congress tries to expand it

Back in May, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), introduced the Government Information Transparency Act (H.R. 2392) in an attempt to standardize the collection of business information throughout federal agencies. It would require agencies to use a single data standard (XBRL) and require that collected information be made readily available for public access.

This month, I found myself suddenly following legislative twitter feeds as the Members of the House of Representatives and Senate debated amendments to the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform bill that included a discussion of requirements that companies use a standard like XBRL when reporting financial data to federal agencies.

One standard to rule them all

Under one proposed amendment, credit agencies, hedge funds and investment advisers would have had to use a “single-standard data language” in the information they report to the Federal Reserve and other agencies. Hopes were high that some form of a data standard mandate would make it into the legislation. Unfortunately, the amendments were eventually dropped from the Dodd bill in one of the late night bargaining sessions on the Hill. It did show an increased awareness and understanding of the value proposition of metadata standards like XBRL at the highest levels of government.

Another interesting approach

Another interesting proposal came this past month in the form of another SEC proposed mandate suggesting that, in addition to filing their complex, dense and almost impenetrable prospectuses, Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) issuers be required to file a computer program that maps out the logic to the flow of funds, or “waterfall,” provisions of the transaction itself. The SEC is proposing that this computer program be filed on EDGAR in the form of downloadable source code in Python in a similar manner as the XBRL financial content of the earlier mandate. Python is a dynamic, high-level programming language that runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and is free to use, even for commercial products, because it uses an open source license. It is an excellent choice for the SEC’s purposes here.

Where the content meets the code

This is where the content meets the code--XML data (aka financial content) and an open logical data model(aka a python script)combine to enable true transparency. It’s one thing to provide the open data marked up with metadata,but if the logic is so dense that even the issuers and trustees have a tough time figuring out who to pay first, as is the case with some ABS securities, it defeats the purpose. When the financial content has become so complex that the simplest way to describe it is with computer code describing the entire waterfall, then the choice to use a freely available open source technology is the right move.

Making financial information more accessible

The obvious goal here is that the filed source code, when downloaded and run by an investor, would provide the user with the ability to programmatically input the user’s own assumptions regarding the future performance and cash flows from the pool of assets, including assumptions about future interest rates, default rates, prepayment speeds, loss-given-default rates, and any other necessary assumptions. Along with the code, the filers would need to supply asset-level data files that would be filed at the time of the offering and on a periodic basis thereafter. Presumably this would be XML content, perhaps even XBRL that when combined with the waterfall computer program, would give investors and regulators the tools to validate the logic and perform simulations and scenarios with it.

Final thoughts

I applaud the SEC's recognition of the need for--in addition to the metadata tagging of financial content with XBRL--an even deeper level of logical ‘tagging’ in order to truly facilitate both the investor’s and the regulator’s ability to navigate, understand, model and monitor the complexities of today’s financial content.

The combined application of open data standards and a open source language will ensure that the content providers and tools vendors across the financial content supply have unencumbered open access to the technologies required to build the tools and infrastructure, to ensure we are all better prepared to recognize any future financial crisis, as Representative Darrell Issa and others members of Congress continue to work to bring higher levels of transparency throughout our federal agencies.

Diane Mueller is Director, Enterprise Product Management at ActiveState, the dynamic language experts; she serves on the XBRL International’s Steering Committee, Best Practice Board, and Technical working group on Rendering and is also a principal advisor to Metamoji.com.

For more information on python and finance, visit http://www.activestate.com/activepython

Inline XBRL (iXBRL) specification approved as a RECOMMENDATION by XBRL International

Front Page — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:18:10 +0000

The XBRL International Steering Committee and the XBRL International Standards Board have approved the publication of the Inline XBRL Specification and the associated registry of specified transformations as a RECOMMENDATION. A conformance suite accompanies this. In addition an open source reference implementation of a validator and extractor has been provided.

For more details please see http://www.xbrl.org/SpecRecommendations/

Tim Berners-Lee to lead the charge to plug Britain into the Semantic Web

Front Page — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:19:36 +0000

Tim Berners-Lee will head up the newly created Institute fo Web Science to push web 3.0 technologies. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged £30m to fund the Institute which will look at ways of commercialising semantic web technologies. Brown said: "This next generation web is a simple concept, but I believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary - just as disruptive to existing business and organisational models - as the web was itself, moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information - and thus opening up the possibility of bypassing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information." The institute, which will also research the development and commercialisation of other next-generation web technologies, will be jointly based in the universities of Oxford and Southampton. The centre - which will be run by world wide web creator Tim Berners-Lee and web science expert professor Nigel Shadbolt - will research how the private sector could use tagged data to spot new business opportunities - such as better identifying areas of customer demand - and increase efficiencies within organisations, through semantic technologies such as XBRL.

For more details see article at http://www.silicon.com/management/public-sector/2010/03/22/gordon-brown-spends-30m-to-plug-britain-into-semantic-web-39745620/

Red Tape Reduction Commission's Efforts Timely

Front Page — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:08:36 +0000

by George Farkas, CEO/ Founder, XBI Software Inc

It is most welcome that in the Federal 2010 budget, the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty announced that they would establish a Red Tape Reduction Commission. A second edition of a study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), “Prosperity Restricted by Red Tape,” estimates that businesses in Canada currently spend over $30 billion each year complying with regulations. This amount is much too high, especially for small business, which is the most important element in stimulating our economy and employment.

XBRL Canada welcomed this announcement. In February, 2007, their annual conference was dedicated to explaining the cost of compliance (red tape). In the report “Reducing the Burden of Compliance through Standardization”, it was pointed out that reducing the compliance burden has two components: One is reducing the amount of information demanded by government. The other is reducing the difficulty in supplying the information that is required.

The new red tape reduction commission should include recommendations:

streamlining compliance when it is important and necessary for Canada
standardizing the terms and formats to reduce the amount of information required
cooperation and collaboration between governments and regulators
requiring submission of the same information to government only once.

The XBRL Canada announcement starts the discussion of using XBRL and SBR (standard business reporting) to reduce the cost of compliance. We expect the new red tape reduction commission, perhaps under the jurisdiction of Stockwell Day, to include experts in all these areas and to do their work quickly and effectively so that Canadians and small business can start profiting from the results as soon as possible.

To learn more about XBI Software, please visit www.xbisoftware.com

To learn more about XBRL Canada, please visit www.xbrl.ca

Send an email to Jim Flaherty, Minister of Finance, and to Stockwell Day, encouraging them to move quickly in establishing this commission as an open and transparent dialogue that encourages participation.

XBRL Canada Welcomes the Announcement of the Red Tape Reduction Commission

Front Page — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:40:24 +0000

TORONTO March 10 /CNW/ - The announcement in the Federal Budget Document tabled in the House of Commons on March 4 that includes a Red Tape Reduction Commission is a welcome move for Canadian business. The complexities of compliance mandated by government agencies are substantial and often redundant. At present, companies who file with the federal departments and agencies must file a diverse number of different reports, usually in different formats. The inefficiency of this approach costs reporting companies substantial dollars in unnecessary expense for systems maintenance, multiple data input and completion of various forms. Leveraging the efficiencies of a unified system employing XBRL could save considerable dollars. It is important to note that XBRL is an open standard currently in various stages of use worldwide.

Over twenty countries have implemented programs to reduce the compliance burden and red tape for companies reporting to government agencies. In several of these countries, XBRL is well recognized as an important part of achieving efficiency within these programs.

The Netherlands, for example, recognized this several years ago and has been implementing XBRL throughout government filings. The estimated value of reducing reporting burdens is approximately (euro)400 million per annum. In addition, they say full implementation of XBRL, "with its wide incorporation across relevant financial accounting software packages will result in substantial time savings to business - up to 33% compared to the time required for traditional annual accounts." A similar program is underway in Australia and under consideration in other countries.

The adoption of XBRL for standardizing the reporting of data is a feasible and cost-effective way to achieve the objective of substantially reducing the cost of compliance by Canadian companies. XBRL Canada will welcome the opportunity to present the efficiencies of XBRL to the Red Tape Reduction Commission as part of its initiative.

XBRL Canada is a not-for-profit consortium, funded and supported by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, formed to foster and encourage the use of XBRL for greater efficiency in Canadian Business.

For further information: XBRL Canada, Gerald Trites, Project Director, (416) 602-3931, Email: gtrites@xbrl.ca

Visit the XBRL-Canada website: http://www.xbrl.ca/

source: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2010/10/c8420.html