XBRL And Its Potential Impact On Events Reporting

Abstract

Financial accounting and reporting has been criticized for producing untimely, periodic, historical-ly-based, and highly-aggregated financial statements that fall far short of meeting the needs of the financial community. Especially recently, the accounting profession has been roundly criticized for its perceived role in highly publicized audit failures including Enron and WorldCom. Proponents of the events reporting paradigm assert that what is needed is an events reporting sys-tem that reports a wider range of relevant and disaggregated events that are free from the biased value judgments and allocations of management. This paper explores the possible role of Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) in the movement toward such an events reporting approach. The web-based XBRL reporting languages allow for the tagging of web-reported business information to provide meaning and context to the information. XBRL pro-vides a platform-independent vehicle for the efficient exchange of business information. Developing XBRL reporting taxonomies will facilitate multi-company financial comparisons and provide a mechanism for obtaining more detail through drill-down analysis.