Group items tagged

"Washington, D.C., May 14, 2008 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted unanimously to formally propose using new technology to get important information to investors faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. At the center of the SEC proposal is "interactive data" - computer "tags" similar in function to bar codes used to identify groceries and shipped packages. The interactive data tags uniquely identify individual items in a company's financial statement so they can be easily searched on the Internet, downloaded into spreadsheets, reorganized in databases, and put to any number of other comparative and analytical uses by investors, analysts, and journalists. The proposed rule would require all U.S. companies to provide financial information using interactive data beginning next year for the largest companies, and within three years for all public companies." Note that reports must currently be submitted in the Edgar format, with WordPerfect the only major word processor writing directly to Edgar. See also http://www.xbrl.org/faq.aspx (.) The proposal is potentially susceptible to legal challenge at the WTO per terms of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agrement on Government Procurement. If approved, XBRL would constitute a "technical regulation" within the meaning of the ATBT and a "technical specification" within the meaning of the AGP. That raises the issue of whether XBRL constitutes an unnecessary obstacle to international trade within the meaning of those treaties. This is the kind of stuff that is supposed to get sorted out by joint creation of an international standard by ATBT member nations. But both treaties are very poorly implemented in the U.S.