Bob Schneider is a Partner in 
Wilson So is the Director of Hitachi Consulting Corporation A Round-Up on the SEC Vote to Mandate XBRL
Written by Bob Schneider Posted on December 24, 2008
“I think this decision today is much bigger than most people realise” wrote John Turner on CoreFiling’s Insight blog. Many reveled with Gary Purnhagen (“We will all be better for it”), while others commiserated with Dan Roberts (“It is sad to see such a missed opportunity”). But everyone seems to agree that the SEC’s 4-1 vote last Wednesday to mandate XBRL for financial reporting marks a major milestone for interactive data.
Tagging of Notes
One point on which there remains some uncertainty is the tagging of the notes to the financial statements. Rob Blake, who live-blogged the webcast on Bowne’s blog, made these entries:
11:27am BIG CHANGE #1: DETAIL NOTES TAGGING: Appears the final rule will back off the detail tagging of the Notes…sounds like only tables in Notes have to be tagged in detail, but not the narratives…very interesting but not unexpected. Have to see the detail…
11:42am: Chairman Cox asks for clarity on the detailed notes tagging; refers to it in the entirety as "optional". I’ll have to go back and read the minutes as I could have sworn there’s still something "more"/different about the Year 2 Notes tagging versus Year 1 Notes tagging.
Here’s what Mark Green, Senior Special Counsel (RegulatoryPolicy) said in his opening remarks:
The face of the financial statements would be tagged in each filer’s first year of interactive data reporting. The financial statement footnotes and financial statement schedules also would be tagged in each filer’s first year, but in block text only. After the first year of such tagging, a filer also would be required to tag the detailed disclosures within the footnotes and schedules. In a change from the proposal, tagging of narrative disclosures would be permitted but not required.
I think some of the confusion stems from the term “narrative disclosure,” which sounds a lot like “narrative reporting” (which itself means different things to different people). In this context, and given how the SEC used the term in the proposed rule, it would appear that Mr. Green was referring to the text of the notes.
I asked Neal Hannon – who has written on note tagging in depth — what he thought the SEC has in mind. He replied by email:
The SEC has made tagging disclosures "optional.” What I think this means is that block tagging will continue and most of the numbers will be tagged, but that individual lines of narrative in a note because of disclosure requirements will not have to be tagged. Toothless tiger.
I think the term “footnotes” itself is unfortunate: it consigns the critical information they contain to the world of ibid., op.cit., and the unpublished diaries of sixteenth century Venetian noblemen. Maybe if, instead of footnotes, we called them “Vitally important facts that belong on the face of the financial statements, except it would be really, really messy to do that,” then these Rodney Dangerfields of the accounting world would get the respect they deserve.
At any rate, let’s hope publication of the final rule provides clarity on the issue.
Resources
In case you are doing research on the meeting or just want to read more about it, I’ve put together the following collection of primary and secondary resources. If I missed anybody’s story worth mentioning, I apologize. Please let me know in a Comment and I will add it the list.
In my view, the best coverage was that of Compliance Week (subscription may be required), the FEI Financial Reporting Blog, and the IR Web Report. (Full disclosure: Compliance Week’s Matt Kelly regularly writes guest posts for us and Dominic Jones of IR Web Report has given us an interview; both the FEI FR Blog and IR Web Report have generously sent traffic our way.)
SEC
Chairman Cox’s Statement (Windows Media Player, QuickTime)
Commissioner Aguilar’s Statement
Senior Special Counsel Mark Green’s Opening Remarks
General Media
AP (Denver Post, Boston Globe, CIO Today, Sci-Tech Today, many others)
The News Tribune This newspaper from Tacoma,Washington – where Charlie Hoffman began working on XBRL — has some of his public reactions to the meeting
Reuters (InformationWeek, Advanced Trading, etc.)
Wall Street Journal Coverage was slight and disappointing
Washington Post, Forbes (PaidContent.org) It’s interesting – and disheartening – that the coverage of these two key media outlets mostly came from a third-party news provider.
I searched the New York Times’s index but did not find a story.
IT and IT/Financial Media
CIO, IT World (IDG News Service)
Financial Media
Accounting Web Has info on January 12 webcast for CPAs
Compliance Week (12/18), Compliance Week (12/23) (subscription may be required) The latter article is better.
Financial and Law Blogs
XBRL Blogs
Data Interactive (Hitachi’x XBRL Blog) Gary Purnhagen (12/17), Dan Roberts (12/21)
Financial Reporting Using XBRL (Charlie Hoffman’s blog) BTW, like a lot of blogs (including ours), not every post Charlie writes gets indexed by Google. That’s a shame, because he posts often and, as might be expected, everything he writes is worth reading twice. Check out his recent posts on taxonomies and the SEC’s XBRL Previewer, or, better yet, go to the blog’s home page and keep scrolling. And in honor of the SEC’s adoption of the final rule, it’s well worth (re-)reading Charlie’s “In the beginning…” piece.
JustSystems Dominic Jones called this “a breathless blog post that seemed to drool in anticipation of the new business [the company] will be getting,” but I don’t think it’s nearly that bad.
Out of the Clouds and into Reality: XBRL for the Business User (Bowne’s blog)
December 27th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Hi,
I have a doubt as to the detailed notes tagging,
The preparers guide says, that when one is doing detailed notes tagging, one needs to tag the text block first & then go on for tagging notes in details. It mentions the narrative disclosures also. I picked up a sample filing from xbrl.us of 3M, whose notes have been tagged in details.
They are following the same principle as suggested in preparers guide, preparers guide is pretty simple explaining the detailed notes tagging.
However, going through the Edgar filers draft released recently, it explains the detailed tagging rule in an incomprehensible way.
Can you throw some light on it.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Hi Punya,
I think we need to wait until the final rule is published by the SEC in the Federal Register to determine exactly what to do. This information should be available mid to late January 2009 and will most likely trigger changes to the EDGAR manual and the XBRL US preparer’s guide.
Neal Hannon