SEC chief accountant highlights XBRL positives

News Article - 26 January 2007
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The chief accountant of America's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has expressed a positive reaction to data tagging through extensible business reporting language (XBRL) for filing financial results.

Conrad Hewitt is now forecasting that the XBRL technology may in the futures become the main way in which all public company filings are tagged.

Mr Hewitt told the Associated Press that the data tags work in a similar way to bar codes, making it easier to both file and evaluate financial results while also cutting the number of errors and enhancing analysis by investors.

"I feel that we'll probably mandate it someday, after we know that it works," he said.

Mr Hewitt also suggested that smaller companies might be able to implement the technology.

"We think that they will be able to, but we do not know it today," he told the news source.

Earlier this month, technology writer Stephen Swoyer claimed that proponents of XBRL believe it to be flexible enough to replace financial data collection methods of both the paper and proprietary kinds.

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