Officials with the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board are considering building "recovery.gov", a website designed to track stimulus spending, to take advantage of the ability of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, XBRL, to manage large financial and economic data sets.
Outside of the United States, one European country is already seeing the benefits of using XBRL.
In government accounting circles, it's known as the "Dutch Taxonomy Project."
Here in the states, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, currently require some clients - some banks and some small to medium sized corporations - to submit their annual and quarterly reports pre-tagged in XBRL. The FDIC has been doing this since 2003.
But David Stephenson, a principal with Stephenson Strategies, a Web and Gov 2.0 consultant in Medfield, Massachusetts, says the most exciting application of XBRL, and the one that most people here in Washington are looking at right now, has been taking place in the Netherlands.
"What the Dutch Taxonomy Project did is to substitute for the 30 or 40 different reports that a typical company would have to do to different agencies, including outside groups like credit bureaus, and banks. Instead, they can file a single datafile that is all done with XBRL tags. And then all of the different reports that the different agencies do draw that data automatically from that single file. So it really reduces the amount of forms you have to do, and at the same time, there's a tremendous benefit from a regulatory standpoint for protecting the public. For the first time ever, it allows you to have all those agencies, if they choose to do so, scrutinize a company simultaneously, instead of in isolation with each other. So if a red flag goes up, with one agency, it's likely there will be a problem with another agency. In the past, they were all operating in isolation from each other, but now they can all be coordinated with each other."
In untagged form, these financial and economic data reports can be complicated, and are often incompatible with each other. Stephenson told me that one benefit they found in Holland with the Dutch Taxonomy Project is that with XBRL, you can make things both simpler and better at the same time.
"They've been able to reduce the number of items (i.e., a datapoint that you would have to report to the government), from 200,000 to 8,000. And, not only has that not impaired the quality of the reporting, it's actually enhanced it, so it's really a win-win solution."
And to sort of bring this back to the stimulus, and recovery.gov, and its broader application here in the U.S. government, Stephenson told me so much ground has already been plowed with XBRL in Holland, it should be fairly easy to implement here.
"Should we choose to adopt it, and using recovery.gov as the initial wedge toward this kind of unified reporting, we can capitalize on all the learning experience they've gained in the Netherlands. It's not as if we would be starting from scratch. And you've got a lot of American firms that are already using this if they have Dutch subsidiaries."
Stephenson adds that the Australian government is preparing to offer XBRL financial submissions as an option beginning next year.
Back here in the U.S., the fly in the ointment of unified financial reporting under XBRL is that, unlike the Dutch Taxonomy Project which has a common set of data tags across the Dutch government, the FDIC and SEC implementations are just different enough to be incompatible with each other. Stephenson says before the U.S. can make the most of XBRL agencies need to agree on one government-wide set of common data tags and definitions.
Stephenson tells FederalNewsRadio that he has talked to the Office of Management and Budget's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, about XBRL and its potential to facilitate government transparency and accountability. He says Kundra isn't officially committed to XBRL, but, "he understands the logic of it." |
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