Accounting Observer > Public Blog - Holiday Cheer & An SEC Freebie

The AAO Weblog covers accounting issues and current events as they relate the practice of investment analysis. All posts prior to September, 2007 are in the public domain, but after September 4, 2007, only subscribers to The Analyst's Accounting Observer will see all posts going forward. Only selected, occasional posts will be released to the public domain from September 4 forward.

Holiday Cheer & An SEC Freebie

Location: Blogs AAO Weblog (Public)
Posted by: Jack Ciesielski	12/14/2006 6:43 AM
Back at last from the AICPA SEC/PCAOB Conference ... and a good time was had by all. Well, at least by me. While it may sound like a mundane affair, it's good to see so many faces that you don't see any other time of year. And good to actually meet some of the people who read this blog. (Thanks for introducing yourselves. And thanks for reading.) And what could be more fun to discuss around the holidays than accounting, auditing and ... XBRL? Whew. I need some real holiday cheer, and quickly. This will be a brief post, even though there are so many interesting things happening this week: the Fannie Mae action against KPMG, the Section 404 revisions for small companies, and Google's online auction plans for employee stock options to name just a few. But ... there's a piece about the conference to write for the subscribers to The Analyst's Accounting Observer. Anyway - I hung around until the bitter end of the conference hoping to glean a nugget or two about the direction of XBRL. More accurately, I should say I was interested in the velocity of XBRL. The direction is well-known, but it's the speed - and the speed bumps - that we don't know enough about yet. By 4:30 PM on Day 3 of the conference, I think there were more members of the XBRL panel than there were members of the audience; had to be tough on the panel, but it's not supposed to be easy being an evangelist, I guess. I should mention that the representative from United Technologies, John Stantial, made a really effective case for XBRL usage within a firm. John also urged analysts to "pull on their companies" to use XBRL, instead of having the SEC "push XBRL onto registrants." Commendable idea, but there's still a nagging lack of readily available (read: free, at least for a trial) front-end software to give analysts and investors something with which to noodle around the XBRL-ified data. Here's a start: the SEC has an experimental reader available for the public to use at this link. Don't get your hopes too high: it's only a start. I spent a few minutes with it; all I'll say for now is that it doesn't reveal the full power of XBRL as claimed by its proponents. But you might want to bookmark the site if only to check back once a month to see if there's a pickup in XBRL's velocity.

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