A consortium of software, consulting and accounting firms hopes to recruit
government financial managers as users of a new electronic publishing language
that standardizes how agencies present financial reports.
The international XBRL Project Committee (www.xbrl.org) has developed
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) as a standard way of tagging
financial data so that it can be easily pulled into electronic financial
statements, tax returns and World Wide Web pages. The standard should help
lower the cost of producing those documents and facilitate the exchange
of information among businesses and the government.
While the committee designed XBRL primarily for public companies that
are required to produce financial statements and reports quarterly and annually,
it also is developing a federal reporting model for the Extensible Markup
Language (XML)-based tool, said Christopher Moyer, an accountant at KPMG
Consulting LLC.
The federal version of XBRL for Financial Statements — the first XBRL
product — will use the Office of Management and Budget form and content
guidelines to appropriately tag reports.
XBRL for Financial Statements is expected to be available in July, following
a 60-day comment period. The committee started building the first specifications
for it on April 6.
The XBRL Project Committee is made up of 40 companies representing the
financial information supply chain, including the American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants, Arthur Andersen, Microsoft Corp., KPMG LLP,
Oracle Corp., Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. and Edgar Online.
A
lot of work has gone into creating the first specifications to define the
technology architecture for the young XML, said Louis Matherne, director
of information technology at the American Institute of Certified Public
Accountants.
XML, a markup language primarily used to post documents with structured
information on the Internet, was accepted as a standard by the World Wide
Web Consortium in February 1999. With the increasing growth of e-commerce,
government and industry are converting data from a variety of formats into
XML.
Using copies of federal financial statements downloaded from FinanceNet
(www.financenet.gov), members of the XBRL Project Committee checked to determine
how closely such documents comply with OMB's guidelines. The closer they
follow the format, the easier it is to develop standard definitions and
to tag the data in a standard way, Moyer said.
Once financial data is put into XML using XBRL as an electronic dictionary,
the data can be disseminated to any format, including a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet or an Oracle database, for example, or directly onto a Web site,
Moyer said. The federal version also uses the Treasury Department's crosswalk
document between the items on a financial statement and OMB form and content
to identify federal financial data.
The committee is in the early stages of educating potential government
users about the language and hopes to draw interest from OMB, the Treasury
Department, the General Accounting Office and other agencies such as the
Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Agriculture Department,
which receive commercial financial statements as well as produce their own,
Moyer said.
As a standard for financial reporting emerges, the government will have
to look at the benefits of moving in that direction, said Karen Alderman,
executive director of the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program,
which publishes federal financial management requirements and conducts qualification
testing for commercial products before they are sold in the federal market.
"Federal financial transactions are a small subset of overall trans-actions,"
Alderman said, "but we are increasingly using commercial means to conduct
them."
XBRL will provide a better understanding of financial data for budgeting
because of the ease of analysis in any software environment, Moyer said.
XBRL for Financial Statements is designed for external financial reports,
but future products will address general ledger, tax, regulatory filing
(for commercial users), accounting and business reports and authoritative
literature.
"The focus is on the area of greatest impact — financial statements — to lead to the rest," said Christy Riechelm, Microsoft's mid-market enterprise
resource planning industry manager. "The Internet is the driver."
