The 2010 XBRL US National Conference is now underway in Philadelphia with the theme: The Path to Transparency. So it seems a good time to pose the question of whether the path to transparency is a Macbethian ‘primrose way to the everlasting bonfire’ or a Stallonian ‘rocky road to righteousness’?
Chuck Callan (Conference Advisory Committee Chair) makes the point that:
Transparency can be defined as openness, communication, and accountability. Many speak of transparency as a cure for today’s challenging times. But just making information available doesn’t take us down the path to transparency. Information needs to be more useable, more accurate and more timely, to truly shed light on the value of an investment, on government spending or on other areas where decisions are made.
In reality, transparency is initially not about data and information at all but about corporate culture. Transparency doesn’t cure anything in the sense of acting as a medication, it’s more like a corporate state of health. Yet intentional transparency is not something that many corporations currently offer to internal, let alone external stakeholders. And communal openness is an even harder step for many to take – without regulation to enforce it that is.
That’s why whatever you think of XBRL as a data standard and the burden of global filing mandates it’s hard to argue that they are not key contributors to lifting the curtain of opacity. XBRL and filing mandates are an integral part of a wider culture shift – a shift that helps get business on the path to transparency and perhaps more able to enjoy the view.
In the last decade or so much of the rocky road of XBRL adoption has been traversed ‘Yo, Adrian’ style and now the primrose way beckons. But not to the everlasting bonfire, rather as one way to help prevent it.
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