SEC Chair Cox and IASB Oversight Chair Herald Global XBRL Standard for Financial Statements

At a recent XBRL conference in the Netherlands, SEC Chair Christopher Cox and IASB oversight Chair Gerrit Zalm proclaimed a strong commitment to global use of XBRL in preparing and filing financial statements. Currently, markets representing two-thirds of the world’s total market capitalization have mandatory or voluntary XBRL filing programs in place.

Chairman Zalm said that, as IFRS becomes the global accounting standard for financial statements, the availability of a high quality IFRS taxonomy, based on XBRL standards, goes hand in hand. In this context, the IASB will provide, free of cost to users, an XBRL taxonomy based upon the IFRS bound volume of standards in a timeframe consistent with the bound volume’s publication.

While maintaining the free availability of the IFRS taxonomy, the IASB promised to use its intellectual property rights to ensure the consistency of the global implementation of the IFRS taxonomy. The Board will also ensure the quality of the taxonomy by providing additional staff resources, where appropriate, and by utilizing the recently created XBRL Quality Review Team and XBRL Advisory Council.

The IASB is also pledged to work with any regulator wishing to use the IFRS taxonomy. For example, the Board is co-operating with the European Commission, the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR), and regulators in Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States, among others.

For his part, Chairman Cox said that, just as IFRS and U.S. GAAP are moving toward convergence, so too is the XBRL community working to align the structures of the data tags for both IFRS and U.S. GAAP. At the same time, the software development community is developing tools that will allow investors to mash up and creatively analyze all of this newly liberated financial data.

Once XBRL unleashes interactive data for thousands of public companies around the world, the SEC chair emphasized, millions of users will find new ways to look at financial statements that even the people who are writing the software cannot yet imagine. There will be exciting opportunities to evaluate financial information in new ways and to derive even greater insights into its meaning, which will change the face of investing forever.