XBRL News

The 17th XBRL International Conference/Expo is co-hosted by XBRL International, Inc. and the XBRL-EU Jurisdiction and is a jointly organized event with the Netherlands Taxonomy Project conference: "Standard Business Reporting in Action." The conference will offer the unique opportunity for visibility to not one but two groups of conference attendees under one roof and will be the largest event executed by XBRL International.

The governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States have regulatory mandates or have voluntary filing program for business reporting using XBRL.

The following organizations have already confirmed attending the XBRL conference: European Commission; European Parliament; Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR); Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS); International Accounting Standards Board (IASB); US Securities and Exchange Commission; US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Ontario Securities Commission; UK Company House; New Zealand Inland Revenue; National Bank of Belgium; Banque de France; Royal NIVRA; Nederlands Belastingdienst; Bundesbank; UBS; Euronext; Bank of Greece; American Institute of Certified Public Accountants; Oracle; Australian Government Standard Business Reporting, PricewaterhouseCoopers; KPMG; Deloitte; E&Y Grant Thornton; BDO Seidman; Hewlett Packard; SAP; Fujitsu; JustSystems; Corefiling; UBMatrix; EDGAR Online; Semansys Technologies; and other software companies and preparers/ issuers

Featured Speakers Include:

-- Gerrit Zalm, Chair of the Trustees - International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation

-- Christopher Cox, Chairman, US Securities and Exchange Commission

-- Eddy Wymeersch, Chair of the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR)

-- Dr. Heinz Hense, Chief Accountant, ThyssenKrupp AG

-- Paul Madden, Program Manager, Standard Business Reporting, Australian Government Treasury Business Executives and Finance

Professionals will participate in unique workshops and forums to hear leading financial industry experts speak on:

-- How governments are requiring XBRL for business reporting and how financial analysts, regulators, accounting professionals, and technologists are collaborating and using XBRL to solve complex business problems and issues.

-- What tools and cost-effective solutions that can be used to help organizations use the power of XBRL to enable investors, management, analysts and regulators to create interactive data, access the business information they want and analyze in a reliable format that they can easily use.

-- Why Interactive Data greatly improves the way in which business information is created, communicated and consumed to help investors, management, analysts and regulators increase the access and accuracy of business information to make quicker, better and more accurate decisions.

By Tim Beyers

Guess who's working on the single most important shareholder initiative in a decade? Berkshire Hathaway? Nope. Apple? Wrong. The do-gooders at Google? Wrong again.

The company doing more for shareholders than any other right now is Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)! See for yourself. (Microsoft's Silverlight software required to view.) Go ahead. I'll wait.

Those at-a-glance performance indicators are made possible by a developing standard called XBRL, which I first wrote about back in September.

Oh, EDGAR, how you've grown
To review, XBRL, short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is a way to code financial data -- "tagging," as it's known -- so that it can be easily organized.

Yes, it is as powerful as it sounds. Witness the Microsoft investor site. By tagging and then aggregating data available in various public sources, Mr. Softy has made it possible, with a few simple mouse clicks, to know everything there is to know about its business -- and, even better, to get that data into a historical record by way of a spreadsheet. (A button for exporting data to Excel is at the bottom of each of Microsoft's data pages.)

Notice, too, that Microsoft included supplementary metrics that are essential points of discussion in analyst presentations, conference calls, and quarterly reports. Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell asked his team to organize this mostly ad-hoc information and post it for easy access. Never before has the bar for transparency been set so high.

Need I count the ways this is good for shareholders? Here are just a few:

• Barriers to understanding are removed. Pick a 10-K annual filing. Any 10-K filing. Read it. Now, is it really so hard to understand why there aren't more people who successfully invest in individual stocks? Only the terminally addicted enjoy reading these documents and picking them apart for the critical data that exists within.
• Disclosure becomes simpler and more powerful. If there's a lesson to be had from the current financial crisis and the ones that preceded it, it's that, in our nation of Enrons, disclosure will always be an issue when it rests in the hands of executives who don't share the dreams of shareholders. XBRL rightly flips the equation. When data distribution is democratic, insider and provincial advantages become (mostly) meaningless, as Fool co-founder David Gardner points out.
• Analysis, not access, becomes paramount. I can't stress this last point enough. Successful investing should never, ever hinge on how much data you're able to access. You should always be able to synthesize the available information into a logical and defensible thesis. That was the rationale for Regulation FD. It's the rationale here as well, and it's still a good one. Begone, yon wicked ivory tower!

Yet with all of these obvious benefits, a problem remains: Few people know about XBRL, or about Microsoft's push for greater disclosure, or -- worst of all -- about the little-publicized resistance to XBRL adoption that a number of companies have expressed to the SEC working group tackling the technology, known as the Advisory Committee for Improving Financial Reporting.

I know about it only because Fool analyst Bill Mann, a member of that working group, told me. Well, that, and because I looked at the active roster for the XBRL consortium. Exactly none of the companies I listed at the open -- all thought to be paragons of investing virtue, to some degree -- is a member.

Dumb. Really freaking dumb, guys.

Here's why. American companies, already under fire for lagging in ethics, R&D, and growth, lag in XBRL, too. Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE), Accenture (NYSE: ACN), and CBS (NYSE: CBS) are three of the notable American names backing XBRL. But many other supporters are big foreign financials, such as South Korea's Kookmin Bank (NYSE: KB), Puerto Rico's Popular (Nasdaq: BPOP), and Germany's Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB).

What you can do
If you agree that XBRL will improve disclosure, let your voice be heard. There are three ways to do so. First, tell Microsoft what you think of its XBRL pages. Second, find out more about XBRL and the public comment process.

And third? Contact the investor-relations departments for each of the companies you invest in. Ask them what their plans are for XBRL, and if they're not implementing it or planning to do so, demand to know why.

It's far better to be a nation of Fools than a nation of Enrons.

The 17th XBRL International Conference and Expo is co-hosted by XBRL International, Inc. and the XBRL-EU Jurisdiction and is a jointly organized event with the Netherlands Taxonomy Project conference: "Standard Business Reporting in Action." The conference will offer the unique opportunity for visibility to not one but two groups of conference attendees under one roof and will be the largest event executed by XBRL International.

The governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States have regulatory mandates or have voluntary filing program for business reporting using XBRL.

Featured Speakers Include:

• Christopher Cox, Chairman, US Securities and Exchange Commission
• Eddy Wymeersch, Chair of the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR)
• Paul Madden, Program Manager, Standard Business Reporting, Australian Government Treasury
• Gerrit Zalm, Chair of the Trustees ' International Accounting Standards Board
• Dr. Heinz Hense, Chief Accountant, ThyssenKrupp AG

Business Executives and Finance Professionals will participate in unique workshops and forums to hear leading financial industry experts speak on:

• How governments are requiring XBRL for business reporting and how financial analysts, regulators, accounting professionals, and technologists are collaborating and using XBRL to solve complex business problems and issues.
• What tools and cost-effective solutions that can be used to help organizations use the power of XBRL to enable investors, management, analysts and regulators to create interactive data, access the business information they want and analyze in a reliable format that they can easily use.
• Why Interactive Data greatly improves the way in which business information is created, communicated and consumed to help investors, management, analysts and regulators increase the access and accuracy of business information to make quicker, better and more accurate decisions.

Who Should Attend and Why:

• CEOs, CFOs and Finance Professionals of public and private companies will be educated on how to tag their financials in XBRL using cost effective vendors and understand the external and internal benefits of using interactive data through real users. They will hear from companies using XBRL to improve investor relations activities and from internal financial management teams using XBRL to consolidate financials and better manage the operations of the company.
• Investment Professionals and Analysts will learn from peers around the world how they are using XBRL to improve the depth and breadth of coverage of companies to help their clients make better investment decisions.
• Regulators will share how they are using XBRL to improve efficiency and accuracy of regulatory reporting and hear case studies from government agencies successfully using interactive data.
• Software developers will be briefed on new tools and add-ons that can be used in their XBRL products that have been created from leading XBRL technology providers.
• Accounting and audit professionals will learn how XBRL is improving client relations by integrating XBRL into their practices and those of their clients.

Where Eindhoven, Netherlands at Evoluon, a world-class conference and exhibition facility:

For XBRL International Conference Information and Registration & Hotel Registration please go to: http://conference.xbrl.org/registration

Register by March 30, 2008 and receive a 10% discount on admission to the conference.

For sponsorship opportunities please to:

http://conference.xbrl.org/sponsors-exhibits/exhibits-and-sponsors

EDGAR Online, Inc. announced today that it is the first public company to simultaneously submit a Form 10-K for year ended December 31, 2007 and XBRL- tagged financial statements to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) using the most recent taxonomies, or XBRL data tags, which were first released by SEC Chairman Cox in December. The 10-K filing and corresponding XBRL translation of EDGAR Online's 2007 financials were submitted and accepted by the SEC EDGAR system today.

The company utilized its I-Metrix platform to convert its financial statements to the latest XBRL standard and filed the documents with the EDGAR system through partner R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company , the leading provider for XBRL services in the U.S. filing market.

"As an organization that is keenly aware of the value that XBRL brings to the capital markets, we are excited to be able to show how quickly and easily a company's financial statements can be translated using our platform and the new taxonomies released by the SEC at the end of last year," said Philip Moyer, CEO of EDGAR Online. "Of course, our database of 10 years of XBRL tagged financials for over 12,000 public companies and XBRL filing solution with R.R. Donnelley can provide the same degree of speed and flexibility for all other SEC filers regardless of size."

Added Moyer, "XBRL isn't a future technology -- it is here, and we are proud to demonstrate that companies can reliably provide the transparency that the investing community seeks without spending hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars deciphering a new technology standard."

The Financial Services Agency (FSA) today launched new EDINET (Electronic Disclosure for Investors' NETwork) system.

EDINET is an electronic corporate disclosure system under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, and all listed or major fund-raising companies and investment funds in Japan are required to file their disclosure documents using the system. The corporate disclosure documents submitted by these entities are publicly available on the Internet through EDINET. All filers are, in principle, mandated to submit in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format the financial statements included in their Annual Securities Reports, Semiannual Securities Reports, Quarterly Securities Reports and Securities Registration Statements for fiscal years starting in or after April 2008.

Quarterly Securities Reports for the first fiscal quarter ending June 2008 will be the first filing in XBRL format. XBRL will facilitate investors to utilize the financial information in an advanced manner through directly downloading the financial information, and processing and analyzing downloaded data with their computers. In new EDINET, the financial information of approximately 5,000 companies and 3,000 investment funds is to be filed and available for public in XBRL format through EDINET. It is one of the most advanced XBRL-adopted electronic disclosure systems in the world.

The financial statements in XBRL format are to be prepared using "EDINET Taxonomy" (Japanese GAAP taxonomy), the final version of which was published in February 8, 2008. ( http://www.fsa.go.jp/singi/edinet/20080208/06.zip http://www.fsa.go.jp/singi/edinet/20080208/06.zip )

FSA continuously advances its efforts in relation to XBRL through various activities such as collaborative work aimed at achieving multinational interoperability together with IASCF (International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation) and US SEC (United States Securities and Exchange Commission).