The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and XBRL US have collaborated to create an XBRL certification program for accountants and preparers who are working with XBRL. The 30-hour online course is intended for public company accountants, external accountants who work with public companies, consultants, and service providers to give them some basic training in working in XBRL.

“This is intended to help our members in business and industry who are doing actual filings, as well as those in public practice who might be asked to provide XBRL services,” said Ami Beers, senior technical manager of XBRL and business reporting for the AICPA. She said XBRL US and the AICPA decided on an online format for the course to meet the needs of those taking the course but also to facilitate a hands-on approach. “This market has a lot of time pressures, and there’s not a lot of extra time to leave the office and go to outside training,” she said. “It’s also very hands on, so they can get the look and feel of what they would be doing in preparing XBRL filings.”

Content for the course was developed by XBRL US, the AICPA, and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which maintains the U.S. GAAP Taxonomy, with additional input from accounting firms and XBRL service providers. The course content will focus on the basics of XBRL and the U.S. GAAP Taxonomy as well as detailed footnote tagging.

The AICPA and XBRL US said research among its members suggests there is a clear market demand for online training, especially among preparers of financial statements who are still learning the ropes of XBRL. “When we did our surveys among both memberships to see if this is something that would interest them, we got an overwhelming response that people really needed this type of information and education,” said Beers.

XBRL International has developed a similar certification program that covers a broad range of topics from an international perspective. XBRL International describes the program as an intensive training and exam process meant to prepare stakeholders at all levels to understand the implications of using XBRL to meet business objectives. “The content (for the U.S. certification) is completely different from the international content,” said Beers. “This will go into more detail in tagging financial statements and how to tag using the GAAP taxonomy.”

Given how new XBRL still is, Beers said she is hopeful accountants and preparers will take advantage of the program to continue to improve the quality of XBRL submissions. “We keep hearing about data quality from the Securities and Exchange Commission and that there are errors occurring in the filings,” she said. “Education will help that.”

Those who participate in the U.S. certification program will be eligible for continuing professional education credits. The program is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2013.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission have published some new taxonomies, and they’re looking for feedback on both.

FASB has published a proposed 2013 U.S. GAAP Taxonomy to update the current taxonomy for a number of new accounting standards and common reporting practices. In the area of accounting standards, the Taxonomy has been updated to reflect the following changes in GAAP that have occurred since the 2012 Taxonomy was finalized:

• Balance Sheet (Topic 210): Disclosures about Offsetting Assets and Liabilities (2011-11);
• Health Care Entities (Topic 954): Continuing Care Retirement Communities— Refundable Advance Fees (2012-01); and
• Financial Services—Insurance (Topic 944): Accounting for Costs Associated with Acquiring or Renewing Insurance Contracts a consensus of the FASB Emerging Issues Task Force (2010-26).

FASB said it also has issued ASU No. 2012-02, Intangibles—Goodwill and Other (Topic 350) but the proposed taxonomy does not incorporate those changes. The board also anticipates other accounting standards updates to be issued in the next 60 to 90 days that may still be incorporated into the 2013 Taxonomy before it ultimately is finalized.

Other changes to the 2013 taxonomy include changes to reflect common reporting practices that FASB notices in company filings, correction of errors and rationalization of duplicated concepts, and updated modeling of existing taxonomy structures and other architectural changes. FASB said some of the changes were made in an attempt to minimize the effect on instance documents that are prepared using prior versions of the taxonomy and at the same time minimize the effect for users and systems that rely on the instance documents.

FASB says it has provided a complete list of all proposed changes from the 2012 to the 2013 taxonomies in the appendices to make it easier for users to make the transition. Even easier, FASB has posted the listing of changes in a worksheet format.

FASB is accepting comments on the proposed taxonomy through Oct. 29 and hopes to have it finalized with approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission in early 2013.

The SEC, meanwhile, is busy with a taxonomy of its own. The SEC recently adopted new rules requiring companies in the “resource extraction” business (oil, gas and other mining) to file form SD to disclose payments to the U.S. or any foreign government related to commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals. The SEC is requiring entities to complete the filing using XBRL, so it created a draft taxonomy to facilitate the filing.  The taxonomy is open for public review and comment through Oct. 31.

Hudson Hollister is founder and executive director for the Data Transparency Coalition, a trade association that is calling on the U.S. government to reform its collection, handling, and reporting of data, specifically to encourage federal agencies to publish their data online using standardized, machine-readable, nonproprietary identifiers and markup language. He is a believer that XBRL is the leading solution to achieve such reform.

It was an enormous undertaking to create taxonomies for financial reporting. How would those be created if the government were to adopt XBRL for other data reporting purposes?

The taxonomy that was developed for GAAP is gigantic. I can’t think of another one that would be that big. U.S. accounting is so diverse, but there’s no other reporting need I can think of that would require so many data elements or where extensions would be used so much. As federal agencies would adopt data transparency policies, there would be separate considerations for each circumstance as to who would set data standards and how it would be done.

Are you supporting the DATA Act?

Definitely. The DATA Act would introduce government-wide recipient reporting, and it would require federal agencies to report all obligations and disbursements. The Treasury Department would be required to report all expenditures, and a single web-based transparency portal would publish all three categories of spending information. Plus, it would impose consistent data identification codes and markup languages. It wouldn’t require any particular data standard, so it would not mandate XBRL as the markup language of choice. It would only say that there ought to be a standard. It passed the House of Representative unanimously in April and it was under consideration in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs before the Senate left for the August recess. With the full agenda Congress faces in September and the November elections, it’s hard to say whether it will pass in Congress this year. But if it doesn’t, there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it into next year and beyond.

Ariel Markelevich, Ph.D., CMA. Associate Professor of Accounting, Suffolk University.  Co-chair, Technical Working Group, XBRL Advisory Committee, Institute of Management Accountants. Part I of the interview can be found here.

Most companies would say their staff is already stretched in complying with the regulatory requirement. How can they go beyond that to make better use of the information?

That is a valid point. I’m certainly aware of the burden, but it’s clear that XBRL is not going anywhere. That becomes more and more clear as we move down this path of XBRL adoption. That doesn’t come as any relief to those who are strained by the XBRL requirement, but if they most comply, the may want to treat it as an opportunity to make some changes. Now is the ideal opportunity as they may be designing information systems and information flow as a result of the requirement. I know it is easier said than done, but if a company can go back to its information flow and look for where in the company there is information that is used in several places within the company, then maybe there’s a way to unify the tagging of information so that it can be accessible in those different places. It may be more efficient.

Can you give an example of where it might be more efficient?

Let’s consider inventory. When a company purchases inventory, it later becomes a cost of goods sold. We need the same information in financial reporting and in managerial accounting to determine the cost of the products that are sold. Overhead is another example. There may be any number of instances where the same information is being rekeyed or re-entered into the system throughout the organization. If a company is fairly complex and has several different information systems, then it may not be practical to or beneficial to integrate the external reporting and the managerial accounting functions. But there are cases where an information system would lend itself to this type of integration.

Ariel Markelevich will discuss these and other XBRL issues during an upcoming webinar Sept. 7.: http://www.knowledgecongress.org/event_2012_XBRL.html

A recent Gartner study on behalf of Financial Executives International suggests finance staff generally view XBRL as an external reporting requirement and show little interest in pursuing use of XBRL-formatted data for internal reporting purposes, leaving IT staff open to take the lead.

The 2012 FEI Technology Study says only about 2 percent of CFOs in the sample group see XBRL as a vehicle for internal reporting, while only 3 percent see that it can be used to supplement some internal reporting. The study confirms there still are various approaches in play for how companies address their XBRL reporting requirement. Nearly 40 percent outsource their XBRL tagging and filing processes while an equal number are planning to adopt a disclosure management solution that embeds into another document format. The study says 20 percent of organizations plan to acquire an XBRL tagging solution only, while 9 percent will manage the tagging requirements in another document format.

In Gartner’s view, the results suggest companies are taking a minimal approach to XBRL, using it only to the extent required by the Securities and Exchange Commission for filing of their financial statements. "The benefits of XBRL-enabled financial information system should be clear -- summarized financial information across multiple accounting systems, and reduced reliance on financial consolidation systems to provide consistent in-process financial reporting,” Gartner writes.

The research group surmises finance organizations may be so stretched in scope that they have little opportunity to consider any further use of XBRL-formatted data or XBRL technology beyond the minimal required uses. “Based on our study, finance will not drive a more revolutionary approach to XBRL, so IT must monitor what its ERP and corporate performance and disclosure management vendors offer for XBRL in their road maps, and should ensure that their finance organizations exploit these capabilities where possible,” Gartner writes.

The study says 42 percent of organizations using disclosure management software see a decrease in financial statement prep time, with 28 percent saying it decreased their prep time by 10 percent or more; 48 percent said they saw no change in preparation demands. Gartner says it believes the benefits include producing financial statements in a more controlled and auditable environment, although it also concedes that the results suggest applications are still evolving.

Imagine there were templates available for your most common disclosures that must be tagged in XBRL. Would it make the tagging and submission of your financial statements easier? Would it provide some assurance that they are correct?

Charles Hoffman thinks so. Hoffman is one of the early pioneers who helped bring XBRL from a science-fiction fantasy to a modern-day reality. He’s working on creating dozens of disclosure templates that are meant to make it faster and easier to assure your XBRL submission is right the first time.

Preparers of financial statements rarely create new disclosures from scratch, said Hoffman. “They cut and paste,” he said, drawing from various sources, including other financial statements, to capture language that has already been blessed by the Securities and Exchange Commission or other regulators with relevant authority. “XBRL takes this to a while new level,” Hoffman said.

In his study of hundreds, maybe thousands, of XBRL submissions, Hoffman has developed a pretty good feel for what a “correct” disclosure should look like in XBRL. It’s a little difficult to be 100-percent certain, he said, since the SEC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board have so far offered little direct feedback or guidance on what they consider to be correct use of the GAAP Taxonomy and correct submission of financial data in XBRL.

Still, Hoffman believes practice is crystalizing based on the experiences of early adopters who have been through the process several times now. “I see filers doing the same thing, and I understand what they are trying to do,” he said. “I’ve distilled a lot of information and packages it into one place -- disclosure templates. They provide a bunch of extremely good clues about how to bottle information in XBRL correctly.”

Hoffman said the templates are a little like Lego structures. He’s assembled all the Lego pieces necessary to build the specific disclosures that are require,d using precisely defined elements common to all financial statements. It’s something of a jumping off point for companies that are new to XBRL, or a way to check or verify existing processes, he said. “It’s useful for companies that have been at this for a while, and for those that are just getting started,” he said.

While Hoffman has produced about 70 or so disclosure templates to date, he sees the potential to create hundreds. “There are as many templates as there are items in a disclosure checklist,” he said. “I’m building a disclosure checklist with a template for every single disclosure in that checklist.”

In deciding which templates to create, Hoffman said he’s following the 80-20 rule, seeking to produce the most critical 20 percent of templates that will be useful to 80 percent of companies. “I will have a high percentage of the disclosures that people commonly use in very short order,” he said. “I know what they are. This will be for the 80 percent of companies that are more alike than they are different.”

The templates are freely available through Hoffman’s blog, and he’s starting to sense software producers are taking note. As software applications continue to mature, he expects disclosure templates to become standard fare.

Part I found here...

If you could only ask only one question in reference checking a disclosure management solution, this is it:

1. How satisfied are you with your disclosure management product and services?

A comprehensive answer to this question should address both product and services and will generally touch on all of the other attributes that you want insight into.

In short, would they make the same decision again? What do they know now that they wish they had known when the disclosure management solution was selected? What has been the major impact vs. the prior reporting approach? Did the implementation process go as planned and was the solution easy to use and deploy? Have there been regular upgrades? How hard or easy has it been to learn and use the software?

As reporting teams are increasing their XBRL competency, the availability of dedicated or periodic XBRL support is essential.

The level of competence in XBRL and in particular, experience with detailed tagging varies considerably among solution providers – and matters a lot. There are also significant differences in the business models of support teams, from a US based specific individual with personal responsibility for your filings, to call centers and distributed models where the actual work is distributed amongst teams around the globe. As reporting teams are increasing their XBRL competency, the availability of dedicated or periodic XBRL support is essential.  Long term, the level of reliance on XBRL services will depend on your company’s philosophy towards achieving self-sufficiency as well as the stability of your team and consistency of your documents.

Service model differences also impact the satisfaction rates for product implementation and ongoing support services.

Software and hardware product architecture also really matter. Product architecture affects collaboration - in particular, cloud-based solutions enable collaboration with colleagues inside and outside the firewall. The level of software integration also greatly influences the user experience.

If the person providing the reference needs some prodding, move on to questions 2 through 5.

2. What was the impact on the SEC reporting process?

Most companies assess this based on:

• The change in the number of days to file and the change in the gap from the earnings release to 10-Q and 10-K filing
• The impact on the team resources required to complete the filing
• The ability to gain control over the entire process including the ability to make last minute changes to both EDGAR and XBRL and eliminate or reduce dependence on outside resources for EDGARizing, XBRL and filing

Note that the change in filing dates after adopting a disclosure management solution vary considerably. Many companies cut a week or more off their fastest previous filing, some more than 20 days while others have added time to their filings. Filing dates alone do not tell the whole story. Many companies found that they were able to complete their 10-Qs and 10-Ks ahead of schedule in the initial quarters but delayed the filing until after the board meeting scheduled.

• What parts of the document preparation and filing process were the most streamlined and which parts, if any, were not affected?
• How has the pencils-down period been impacted?
• Describe the XBRL QA and validation process.

The ability to reduce the reporting team’s night and weekend hours along with shorter reporting cycle rarely drives the ROI assessment but has a significant impact on the reporting team  and indeed on executive management which can reduce  their time focused on compliance reporting.  Legal and auditor fees may also be reduced with a shortened reporting process.

3. Describe the implementation process.

Many reporting teams actually realize time savings during the initial implementation quarter but implementation cycles vary significantly based on the product architecture, who is performing the implementation and company-specific considerations.

• How long did it take to get the solution up and running and for your team to be comfortable with it?
• What were the XBRL transition expectations at the time of implementation?
• Did the implementation go as planned?
• In hindsight, what would have contributed to a smoother process?
• Did outsourcing yield a faster and ultimately lower cost implementation?
• How was the transition from implementation to production?

It is helpful to understand the factors that contribute to shorter (weeks) and longer (months) implementation period(SaaS vs. client server architecture, outsourced vs internal resources, fast tracked reporting calendar objective, XBRL transition phase, etc. as well as when the implementation took place.  On balance, more recent implementations may be more relevant to your planned implementation.

Part III coming soon...

As thousands of public companies are beginning the final march toward their first-ever detail tagging under XBRL Mike Starr, deputy chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission, is looking ahead to what more must be done to drive greater acceptance for XBRL.

At the recent IFRS Taxonomy Annual Convention, Starr said XBRL stakeholders need to work toward an important goal to reach the “final destination” of the XBRL journey. That is, assuring investors are able to view and use XBRL-formatted information using the same software application and process, regardless of which XBRL financial reporting taxonomy is used and regardless of what the underlying content is.

“Today, that is not possible,” Starr said. “Consequently, I believe it is imperative that future XBRL taxonomy development efforts give due consideration to the needs of investors.”

In the United States, companies are required to use an SEC-approved taxonomy to format their financial statements in XBRL and submit them with the SEC. The SEC has approved a taxonomy for companies that follow Generally Accepted Accounting Standards, but it has not yet approved a taxonomy for foreign private issuers who follow International Financial Reporting Standards. That means IFRS filers in the United States are exempt fomr the requirement to submit their financial statements in XBRL.

Starr is often asked when the SEC will approve an IFRS taxonomy. “The short answer is we don’t know,” he said. “There are taxonomy design differences between the US GAAP taxonomy and the IFRS taxonomy that prevent users from using the same application and process to consume data from either taxonomy. He said FASB and IFRS teams working on taxonomy development are working on a solution.

Starr said the SEC’s deferral on approving an IFRS taxonomy is not a reflection on the quality of either the latest IFRS or GAAP taxonomies. “The differences between the two taxonomies can represent different, but equally acceptable, technical design choices,” he said. “Ultimately, design choices can be a delicate balancing act between the burden to the preparer to tag the information and the benefit to the investor derived from efficient access to the data.”

The challenges for the future shouldn’t detract from the achievements to date, Starr said. In the U.S. financial reporting arena alone, more than 9,000 companies are filing XBRL-formatted information across 35,000 filings, producing more than 18 million discrete financial facts.

And companies have improved their use of the taxonomy, he said. The SEC has called on companies to make more careful tax selections and reduce their use of extensions, which reduce comparability. In the past year, Starr said, extensions used in the core financial statements fell from 11 percent to 8 percent while extensions for the detail tagging of footnotes declined from 26 percent to 17 percent.

Companies are quickly migrating from outsourcing with third party XBRL tagging vendors to built-in application implementations, which are also commonly known as 'Disclosure Management' applications.  With the March 31, 2012 XBRL reports submitted to the SEC's EDGAR over 2,000 companies have made this transition.  As a result of these 'built-in' implementations, leading practice companies are realizing 30%+ cost and time reductions in their report assembly and review processes.

For the companies that are considering Disclosure Management applications, there are some features that may help to differentiate individual application feature strengths and weaknesses as it relates to company specific reporting environment process, controls and diversity of reporting requirements.

Following is a listing of some of the differentiating features reporting professionals may consider when assessing the effectiveness of Disclosure Management applications for their specific and unique reporting environment and corporate culture:

• Client Server or SAAS - The implementation approach may have an effect on how Disclosure Management applications are used as well as potential access to and security of draft company reports. Client Server implementations typically require engagement of corporate IT Resources where SAAS implementations may require less consideration of internal corporate infrastructure. Certain SAAS-oriented Disclosure Management applications may not enable connectivity to source systems, thereby requiring an incremental manual step to upload relevant source information into the SAAS platform. Further, the nature of the application (e.g. Client Server of SAAS) may also affect license and maintenance costs as well as the timeliness of application updates.  Care should be taken to understand licensing costs for some SAAS applications where costs are associated with report volume; and can appear to be very reasonable when thinking about the problem in the context of three 10-Q's and a 10-K per year and possibly less reasonable when thinking about the hundreds to thousands of compliance reports required by regulators here in the U.S. as well as in countries around the world.

• Connectivity with the full range of source systems relevant to reporting and quality analysis. How does the Disclosure Management application 'connect' to company consolidation, ERP, spreadsheet applications and other relevant information sources? How easy can reporting professionals connect to the broad range of internal information sources relevant to reporting?

• Interoperability -- Connectivity with relevant information sources via a semantic XBRL-format interface.  Does the Disclosure Management application 'consume' XBRL thereby enabling reporting professionals to pull information from a broad range of information sources including external sources such as the SEC EDGAR system?  In the short term, the ability to consume XBRL is particularly relevant for those companies looking to streamline their peer analysis and risk assessment processes.  In the longer term, the ability to pull standardized content from a range of internal data stores may be particularly relevant to a broad range of performance management, business intelligence and integrated reporting efforts.

• Taxonomy Mapping -- automated taxonomy mapping "wizards" that provide suggestions for specific taxonomy elements relevant to specific company disclosures.   More advanced Disclosure Management applications also provide peer company benchmarking on disclosure elements.  Reporting professionals may also want to inquire as to the range of taxonomies for which the mapping wizards apply and how quickly new taxonomy versions are incorporated.

• Taxonomy Management -- features targeting the import, view, and management of multiple taxonomies relevant for a single report.  Reporting professionals may also want to inquire as how Disclosure Management applications handle unused extension elements and presentation links, the units registry and the timeliness of addressing new taxonomy releases.

• Rules Management -- features enabling assessment and analysis of various standardized rule bases such as those outlined in the SEC's EDGAR Filer Manual and those developed and maintained by company reporting professionals.  Reporting professionals may also want to inquire as to the collaborative nature of rules with others, both within the company and within the vendor customer base.

• Collaborative Workflow and Controls -- Empower the entire extended reporting team to collaborate on report disclosures (within a single document or one constructed of document components) in a simultaneous, multi-user process.  Collaborative processes within controlled workflows that enable management oversight and monitoring of widely distributed and authorized professionals who can author, tag, review and edit disclosures.  This common feature empowers reporting professionals to more effectively share and build corporate intellectual property and when desirable collaborate with trusted partners outside of the enterprise (e.g. legal counsel, audit committee members, third party auditors, advisors, etc.).

• Report management -- Manage a broad range of report attributes highly relevant for reporting professionals including the roll forward of prior period values, metadata, dates, headers, references, etc.; and the synchronization of report disclosures and related metadata used within a single report and/or across multiple reports; and report navigation including ease of disclosure filtering, visualization, reference management, comments and revisions management; and query or search capabilities across disclosure content and related metadata.

• Presentation management -- Management of a broad range of reporting templates reusing company disclosure information.   Value added features may include a range of reporting formats (e.g. pdf, html, ppt, xls, doc, xbrl, EDGARization, etc.) as well as standardized communication methods including RSS.

• Reference management -- Identification and management of the explicit relationships between disclosures and relevant standards and SEC Regulations (such as those included within the US GAAP Taxonomy) as well as those within the company such as those relevant to company policies and resources.

• Analytical Assessments -- Support for reporting professionals to effectively interrogate draft and final reports to identify reporting issues that some investors and analysts may perceive as material errors.  Reporting professionals may want to inquire as to how the Disclosure Management application enables them to more effectively identify common disclosure meta-data issues and make the subjective assessments critical for high quality reports.  This feature is particularly relevant when it enables identification and review of subjective assessments in the presentation context of reported disclosure.

• Technical Compliance -- Support of the XBRL Technical Specification and periodic updates including the XBRL Inline Specification (iXBRL) which is increasingly the compliance format of choice for regulatory XBRL mandates.

• Support -- Technical support for users in countries around the world, including taxonomies and rules relevant to specific regulatory agency reporting requirements.  Support would also include languages relevant to professionals working in countries around the world (e.g. English, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, etc.).

• Solvency II Taxonomy -- support for this taxonomy requiring information disclosures as well as those for risk models and formulas.  This feature is particularly relevant to reporting professionals in the insurance sector and may also be more broadly relevant to reporting professionals looking to collaborate on reporting concepts such as financial and nonfinancial Key Performance Indicators.

While the above is certainly not a complete listing, it does provide reporting professionals with some feature topics that may be useful when considering Disclosure Management alternatives.  When discussing these features with software vendors, it is a good idea to ask questions in the form of "How does the application do XYZ?" question rather than simply "Does the application do XYZ?"  The response to a 'How does' question may allow reporting professionals to gain better insights as to the level of complexity, effort, time, cost for a particular feature rather than a more 'yes' or 'no' response as to the existence of a specific feature.  How does that sound?

Comments to this blog that identify additional differentiating features would be greatly appreciated.

by Mike Willis

If it eventually becomes an option in the United States, in-line XBRL may become “the only thing that saves XBRL from itself,” according to XBRL pioneer/consultant/blogger Dan Roberts.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is testing the waters to see if companies are interested in having the option to file their financial statements in in-line XBRL. In Roberts’ view, they’re more than interested.

“Until there is the ability to file a single report with the SEC, there will continue to be resistance” to XBRL broadly, according to Roberts. “Of course, until the SEC can prove that XBRL is delivering benefits exceeding the cost to business, then there will continue to be opposition.”

In-line XBRL allows XBRL tags to be embedded within an HTML document. Members of the SEC staff, including Deputy Chief Accountant Mike Starr, have begun talking with practitioners about whether companies would like to have a choice between continuing to file HTML and XBRL financial statement separately, or skipping those separate filings and instead filing a single submission via in-line XBRL. It’s already the norm in the United Kingdom, where companies file financial statements and tax returns using in-line XBRL.

In-line XBRL is a natural step in the continued development of XBRL technology, in Roberts’ view, and a necessary step to further drive acceptance. XBRL makes data readable by computers, but it’s rugged on the human eye. In-line XBRL solves that problem. “In the end, if it does not pass the eyeballs test, how can we give assurance that all that data is really what we thought it should be?” he asks.

In-line XBRL enables human eyes to better comprehend the data produced through XBRL, he says. It also would solve a big problem that continues to crop up in XBRL submissions. Companies continue to create extensions in their XBRL filings specifically to produce a specific look to the filing, to make it easier to read and comprehend, even though the SEC has asked them repeatedly to quit doing so.

Tags should be chosen solely based on the definition of the data to be tagged, and extensions should be created solely to describe items so unique a company’s financial statements that none of the thousands of tags in the GAAP taxonomy adequately explains it. Still, some companies continue to produce extensions to correct linear problems that the eyes just can’t reconcile.

Starr has invited companies to share their views on whether they would welcome an in-line XBRL option. You can contact him at the Office of Interactive Disclosure at Ask-OID@sec.gov or 202-551-5494.