News

Media Advisory, Spain - 05Mar08 

La 17 edición de la Conferencia y Exposición Internacional XBRL estará presentada por XBRL International, Inc. y la jurisdicción europea de XBRL y se trata de un evento organizado conjuntamente con la conferencia holandesa del proyecto de taxonomía: "Standard Business Reporting in Action." La conferencia ofrecerá una oportunidad única de visibilidad de no solo uno sino de dos grupos de asistentes a conferencias bajo un mismo techo y será el mayor evento organizado por XBRL International. Entre los exponentes de la conferencia se encuentran: • Christopher Cox, Presidente de la SEC de EE.UU. • Eddy Wymeersch, Presidente del CESR. "El comunicado en el idioma original, es la versión oficial y autorizada del mismo. La traducción es solamente un medio de ayuda y deberá ser comparada con el texto en idioma original, que es la única versión del texto que tendrá validez legal".

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.

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

By Stephen Roth

The US Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the country's stock markets, gave a major push to the electronic financial reporting language XBRL with several new initiatives this month. John Stokdyk reports.

The SEC has accepted electronic filings in the extensible business reporting language (XBRL) for several years, and users can download these files for free from the SEC's online search engine Edgar.

SEC chairman Christopher Cox is an XBRL enthusiast who sees it as a "universal" language that represents the future of financial reporting. Earlier in February, Cox welcomed a report from the commission's advisory committee on improvements to financial reporting and vowed to consider its recommendations, which included making electronic filing of XBRL-tagged financial statements mandatory for top 500 companies.

The 112-page committee report acknowledged that not all the ingredients were in place yet, but predicted that some of the conditions were not far away from resolution. The first hurdle is to ensure that reporting companies have the capacity to implement the XBRL-based taxonomy for US generally applied accounting principles and secondly Edgar needs to be able to render the accounts accurately.

However one of the committee members raised concerns about whether it would be possible to provide third party assurance over the contents of XBRL-tagged financial statements - for example to ensure they applied the GAAP taxonomy correctly and that the XBRL documents did not create the potential to mislead investors. Independent assurance should be provided, the committee advised, providing that the extra audit did not result in a significant increase in costs.

Once these preconditions and reservations have been overcome, the committee urged the SEC to consider extending mandatory electronic filing not just for large domestic US corporations, but all other reporting companies.

In a parallel move, the SEC also introduced a new rule to eliminate a range of paper-based disclosures required from non-US listed companies. Granting an exception under rule 12g3-2(b) to foreign companies would mean that their non-US disclosure documents would have to be published electronically. This would make it easier for US investors to gain access to the material and to make better informed investment decisions, the SEC said.

To give tangible shape to these electronic reporting initiatives, the SEC launched an XBRL-based Financial Explorer to let investors compare the financial results of public companies. The Financial Explorer uses the underlying financial data to produce diagrams and trend charts for earnings, expenses, cashflows, assets/liabilities and financial ratios - without the need to copy and paste rows of revenues and expenses into a spreadsheet.

In addition to Financial Explorer, the SEC offers investors two other online viewers - an Executive Compensation viewer and the Interactive Financial Report viewer. The Executive Compensation viewer lets investors compare what 500 of the largest US companies pay their top executives and the Interactive Financial Report viewer helps investors gather, analyse, and compare the XBRL-based financial disclosures currently filed voluntarily by US companies.

"XBRL is fast becoming the universal language for the exchange of business information and it is the future of financial reporting," said Cox. "With Financial Explorer or another XBRL viewer, investors will be able to quickly make sense of financial statements. In the near future, potentially millions of people will be able to analyze and compare financial statements and make better-informed investment decisions. That's a big benefit to ordinary investors."

By Judith Burns

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said Tuesday that he expects the SEC will propose rules this year on credit-rating agencies.

"There's a great deal of interest in credit-rating agencies and the SEC's planned rulemaking in this area," Cox told reporters after testifying to a House subcommittee on small-business contracting and technology. He said he expects an SEC proposal on rating firms this year, calling it "a high priority."

Rating firms such as Moody's Investors Service Inc., a Moody's Corp. (MCO) unit, and Standard & Poor's, a division of McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. (MHP), have come under criticism recently for being slow to downgrade securities backed by risky "subprime" mortgage loans. Although the SEC has new authority to inspect ratings firms, it is barred from looking at rating firms' methodologies.

Separately, Cox said he expects the SEC will publicly announce its plans within the next month or so for rulemaking on international accounting, data-tagging technology using extensible business reporting language, or XBRL, and for a system of "mutual recognition" of regulators outside the U.S.

In his prepared remarks to the House panel, Cox endorsed legislation that would require documents issued by federal agencies to be written in plain English. As part of the push for plain English, Cox said the SEC plans to survey investors soon on the usefulness of corporate annual reports, proxy statements, mutual-fund prospectuses and other required disclosure documents. The SEC may consider changes based on what it hears and will repeat the surveys in the future to see if investors are reading such documents or just pitching them into the trash bin, Cox added.

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.

 

Featured Speakers Include:

• Christopher Cox, Chairman, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 
• Eddy Wymeersch, Chair of the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR)
• Gerrit Zalm, Chair of the Trustees – International Accounting Standards Board (IASB)

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/

Click here for sponsorship opportunities (http://conference.xbrl.org/sponsors-exhibits/sponsor-packages).

By Tim Colebatch

THE Rudd Government is planning a blitz of reforms to reduce the cost of regulation to business — including requiring old regulations to be removed each time new ones take effect.

The Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, last night promised to introduce a kaizen culture of "continuous improvement" in regulation, to end its rapid growth and begin "genuine deregulation".

While Treasurer Wayne Swan was in Melbourne cuddling up to the Business Council of Australia — whose budget submission this week backed Labor's critique of the Howard government, saying it had spent too much, and on the wrong things — Mr Tanner told the Sydney Institute the Government would put an accelerated plan for deregulatory reform to the Council of Australian Governments next month.

Mr Tanner said the reforms would include:

■ Standard business reporting, to allow firms to submit BAS statements, state tax returns, ASIC documents and Bureau of Statistics survey forms through faster, easier processes using their own software.

■ Nationally consistent occupational health and safety laws.

■ Streamlined environmental assessment processes to stop time wasting.

■ A fresh look at the 170 recommendations of the Banks taskforce on deregulation, which were delivered in 2006 but were mostly left unimplemented.

■ Regular reviews by the Productivity Commission of the regulatory burden in each sectors of the economy.

"We are serious about change," Mr Tanner said. "I want to break down the barriers impeding regulatory reform. I intend to introduce a culture of continuous improvement in regulatory activity — a culture in which government is always looking for opportunities to streamline regulatory processes."

This would include requiring any minister proposing new regulation to identify other areas where regulation could be removed or modified to reduce compliance costs for business, he said.

Regulatory proposals would not come to cabinet unless accompanied by a regulatory impact analysis endorsed by the independent Office of Best Practice Regulation.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Mr Swan told a Business Council dinner that Labor was looking at years of fiscal reforms to enhance the long-term productive capacity of the economy: above all, "labour, infrastructure and skills".

"One budget can't do it all," Mr Swan said. "This budget and those that follow are the key policy documents for laying down our agenda to tackle future challenges."

He applauded the budget submission from the big business lobby, which urged Labor to widen its spending cuts to embrace a three-year freeze on real government spending.

Echoing the close relationship between the BCA and the Hawke Labor government, he enthused: "Your submission demonstrated that, in so many ways, there is a strong overlap between your priorities and ours."

The US Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the country's stock markets, gave a major push to the electronic financial reporting language XBRL with several new initiatives this month. John Stokdyk reports.

The SEC has accepted electronic filings in the extensible business reporting language (XBRL) for several years, and users can download these files for free from the SEC's online search engine Edgar.

SEC chairman Christopher Cox is an XBRL enthusiast who sees it as a "universal" language that represents the future of financial reporting. Earlier in February, Cox welcomed a report from the commission's advisory committee on improvements to financial reporting and vowed to consider its recommendations, which included making electronic filing of XBRL-tagged financial statements mandatory for top 500 companies.

The 112-page committee report acknowledged that not all the ingredients were in place yet, but predicted that some of the conditions were not far away from resolution. The first hurdle is to ensure that reporting companies have the capacity to implement the XBRL-based taxonomy for US generally applied accounting principles and secondly Edgar needs to be able to render the accounts accurately.

However one of the committee members raised concerns about whether it would be possible to provide third party assurance over the contents of XBRL-tagged financial statements - for example to ensure they applied the GAAP taxonomy correctly and that the XBRL documents did not create the potential to mislead investors. Independent assurance should be provided, the committee advised, providing that the extra audit did not result in a significant increase in costs.

Once these preconditions and reservations have been overcome, the committee urged the SEC to consider extending mandatory electronic filing not just for large domestic US corporations, but all other reporting companies.

In a parallel move, the SEC also introduced a new rule to eliminate a range of paper-based disclosures required from non-US listed companies. Granting an exception under rule 12g3-2(b) to foreign companies would mean that their non-US disclosure documents would have to be published electronically. This would make it easier for US investors to gain access to the material and to make better informed investment decisions, the SEC said.

To give tangible shape to these electronic reporting initiatives, the SEC launched an XBRL-based Financial Explorer to let investors compare the financial results of public companies. The Financial Explorer uses the underlying financial data to produce diagrams and trend charts for earnings, expenses, cashflows, assets/liabilities and financial ratios - without the need to copy and paste rows of revenues and expenses into a spreadsheet.

In addition to Financial Explorer, the SEC offers investors two other online viewers - an Executive Compensation viewer and the Interactive Financial Report viewer. The Executive Compensation viewer lets investors compare what 500 of the largest US companies pay their top executives and the Interactive Financial Report viewer helps investors gather, analyse, and compare the XBRL-based financial disclosures currently filed voluntarily by US companies.

"XBRL is fast becoming the universal language for the exchange of business information and it is the future of financial reporting," said Cox. "With Financial Explorer or another XBRL viewer, investors will be able to quickly make sense of financial statements. In the near future, potentially millions of people will be able to analyze and compare financial statements and make better-informed investment decisions. That's a big benefit to ordinary investors."

By Michael P. Cangemi

As financial executives of both public and private companies absorb the events and happenings of 2007 and look ahead at what's in store for them in 2008, FEI CEO and President Michael P. Cangemi has compiled the following list of the Top Challenges for 2008 - in no particular order: Global Convergence of US GAAP and IFRS. Are the US markets ready for principles-based standards? The first step towards answering that question is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decision in November to eliminate the US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) reconciliation for foreign private issuers that file financial statements in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), as promulgated by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Now on the agenda is consideration of the comments on the SEC concept release to allow US issuers to file financials in IFRS. On the flip side, we await another decision: Is the European Union (EU) ready to accept US GAAP without reconciliation to IFRS by non-EU based companies that list in the EU? And, will the EU continue to adopt IFRS with carve-outs, or will the EU follow IFRS, "as published by IASB?" With the IASB Small and Medium-Sized Entity (SME) standards also out for consideration, this is not just a public company issue. As FASB and IASB move toward global accounting standard convergence, the SME standard may likely keep pace with, rather than trail, the standards for public companies. Additionally, other priority issues include: strengthening the IASB's funding, governance and oversight as it increasingly moves towards becoming "the" global standard-setter in accounting. XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) and Interactive Financial Reporting. The SEC has clearly made XBRL a priority and continues to reinforce in all its communications that it favors a path toward adoption. Expect even more momentum in this direction in 2008 in advance of potential leadership changes at the SEC in an election year. By now, the full set of GAAP taxonomies has been released for public comment by April 4. Also, the SEC plans roundtables across the country to get preparer and user feedback. As the SEC moves forward with IFRS, the taxonomies for both GAAP and IFRS must also be considered together to ensure convergence occurs from a technology standpoint as well. Besides financial reporting, there are potential benefits in the areas of internal financial analysis and continuous auditing.

On February 13, 2008, the XBRL-based financial listed company taxonomy formulated by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) was "Acknowledged" by the XBRL International. The acknowledgement information has been released on the official website of the XBRL International (http://www.xbrl.org/FRTaxonomies/). All the technical documents of the taxonomy have been published on the SSE website of http://xbrl-cn.org to the public for wider application.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will spend upwards of A$500,000 (NZ$573,000) developing an extensible business reporting language (XBRL) infrastructure to streamline information exchange with external organisations.

The ABS is participating in a federal government initiative called Standard Business Reporting (SBR) which is aimed at reducing the regulatory reporting burden for business.

The ABS is seeking offers for an XBRL taxonomy development environment (XTDE) and has budgeted between A$300,000 and A$500,000 for the task.

SBR is a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional programme led by the Treasury and involves the ABS, the Australian Tax Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, and the offices of state revenue.

Based on overseas experience, and an "acceptance" by the accounting and financial services professions, XBRL has been selected for use within the SBR program.

XBRL taxonomies will be embedded within accounting software packages to allow the automated population of government forms based on financial and other information held in the software of the business.

"After user completion, editing and authorisation, the resulting data will be submitted electronically to government," according to the ABS.

XBRL taxonomies used in the SBR project may be generated from an environment called the data definition repository. The core of the DDR will be a technology neutral metadata store, in which agency data and form definitions will be "collected and harmonised".

The ABS anticipates the need for three capabilities within the XTDE — a taxonomy editing environment, a taxonomy collaboration environment, and a taxonomy testing environment. These may be provided by separate tools, or may be integrated within a single tool.

The ABS will begin work on the project in February.