The limited liability provision for XBRL is expiring meaning companies will no longer be protected from errors or mistakes made in their XBRL filings. This is creating a growing demand for easy to use products that can ensure compliance with all aspects of the SEC XBRL mandate and is driving growth in the assurance engagements under AICPA’s SOP 09-1 (Agreed Upon Procedures). Companies and their Auditors need products that produce accurate, reliable information with the option to review and assure the filing is valid.

CoreFiling works with regulators, government agencies and corporations globally in managing, producing, collecting, reviewing and understanding XBRL data. Their Magnify product is the top validation product in our industry. It combines a step by step checklist to review automated validation tests while providing the market’s most extensive validation tool for in-house accountability and transparency.  Pairing Magnify with Rivet’s Dragon View™, the industry-standard XBRL view and review tool, is a total win for our customers. Magnify enhances Dragon View to provide customers with full document verification so they can feel confident their filings are accurate. We’ve packaged these two products into one offering – Rivet’s XBRL Auditing Package.

We all want peace of mind when it comes to filing our reports and these products are designed to do just that. Magnify and Dragon View both ensure accuracy while reducing the amount of time it takes to process filings while offering the easiest interface in the industry, equipped to handle some of the most complex concepts in financial statements today.  This product is perfect for CPAs and Auditors who are looking to support their clients’ XBRL review needs with confidence and ease.

Limited liability will soon be a thing of the past.  The Rivet – Corefiling partnership will ensure that CPAs, Auditors, and Public Companies have the tools they need to ensure accurate and reliable filings, which will ultimately lead to our shared goal – financial transparency.

• apply “tags” to it the first time it is entered, giving data meaning and context
• distribute it automatically and in real time, when it will be of most use
• make it available to everyone in an organization – and often outside it – who needs the data (rather than to just a few elites)
• provide new Web 2.0 tools letting non-technical users analyze and act on data collaboratively.

To achieve this worthy aim, the book also proposes a 13-point Liberating Data Manifesto that you will be glad to hear does not involve either burning a bra or shattering a glass ceiling – neither of which are now advisable as they both fail health and safety regulations.

Darrell Issa, (R-CA) released the following statement recently regarding the House vote on the question of raising the debt ceiling, “Government debt is crushing our economic growth potential and saddling future generations with a crippling burden. Every dollar the government spends comes from either the taxpayers or is borrowed. Every dollar of spending that is cut is a dollar more that is left in the private sector to be reinvested, directly or indirectly, towards economic expansion and job creation.”

One solution is quite simple: effective financial communication of government revenue sources and spending through a standards based communication platform such as XBRL. The SEC quickly recognized that the power of XBRL could be leveraged to streamline financial communications to empower both regulators and investors. XBRL has already begun to show its value, so why not use it to actively track government expenses and investments? It should be up to each and every one of us in this industry to come together and leverage the power of XBRL to allow for transparency in Government budgeting process. The synergy of XBRL and our skill-sets in innovation and leadership may well enough be a gateway to better financial resilience that can benefit us all.

Congressman Issa says it best in describing what the next step for Congress should be, “The American people have shown their willingness to sacrifice through tough economic times and Congress should follow their lead.” So let’s take a stance, work with our legislators, and pass legislation to track where the Federal government spends our money.

In line with our mission to mainstream ESG reporting, a key aim of the G4 Guidelines is to harmonize Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and sustainability reporting practices around the world. In order to be fit for mainstreaming, the G4 Guidelines will need to be “standard ready”; robust enough to support higher levels of assurance and help companies to produce reports that are trusted by markets and stakeholders.

Note that term ‘standard ready’. It’s impossible to be ‘standard ready’ in today’s world of online information communication without the use of a data standard – like XBRL. So let’s hope that the GRI walks the talk.

Apparently the U.S. Chamber of Commerce responded with this:

Not informing the company of a potential fraud and waiting for the SEC to act is the equivalent of not calling the firefighters down the street to put out a raging fire and instead calling the lawyers from the next town to sue over the fire instead.

To which a transparency advocate might respond that:

Not informing an external regulator of a potential fraud and keeping it in house is the equivalent of handing an arsonist the keys to a petroleum store they don’t know about and expecting that you won’t be tossed into the flames like a Cathar in medieval France.

Currently a lot of whistleblowing is being done at the wrong frequency. You know like those special whistles that only dogs can hear, so it passes most of us humans by but drives Fido nuts. This S.E.C. initiative is helping to put information about potential corporate fraud within everyone’s aural range.

That being said, I’m not expecting an RSS whistleblower feed from the S.E.C. anytime soon. But that would definitely liven things up a little from a transparency perspective.

Hey! Luigi…gimmee a Tunis Consensus on rye and hold the paprika.

But sorry, it’s not.

In fact it’s a document from 2010 about realizing Africa’s own vision for development and part of that vision includes greater transparency in terms of how aid funding is decided and spent:

Participants agreed that better information flows were essential to improving accountability. Nothing less than full disclosure of development expenditure is necessary. Fiscal transparency includes publishing budget plans and reports and ensuring that the public has ready access to information on the state of public finances and on the structure, functions and financing of public institutions. [p.10 - The Tunis Consensus]

The portal aideffectiveness.org has a page on mutual accountability. However the site has very little to say about data standards and nothing about XBRL. But yet again this is a problem with a clear solution – an XBRL taxonomy for reporting aid data (XAID).

There is absolutely no reason why this aid taxonomy needs to be that complicated. It would help to resolve a global issue by creating a global standard that Governments and NGOs can use to track, report and visualize aid flows by means of a common data standard.

But more importantly, XAID will help donor taxpayers – especially in generous countries like the USA - to fully understand where their aid money is going, whether promises are being kept and what the aid ROI actually is. All of which are at the heart of ‘mutual accountability’.

Something else for Congressman Issa to consider?

Creating transparency – Simply making big data more easily accessible to relevant stakeholders in a timely manner can create tremendous value.

As this is a big report I thought I’d start analyzing it by creating a wordcloud from the text. The results were not that enlightening.

bi-data-cloud

Surprise, surprise! Among the most frequently used words were ‘big’ and ‘data’. Time to do some more analysis. No mention of XBRL and only a quick mention of XML in the list of big data technology, which is surprising given that there are 11 mentions of the need for the use of  ‘standards’ in the way data is stored and communicated.

Yet McKinsey rightly states that:

These standards can emerge from industry standard-setting bodies, but government can play an enabling role.

and then fails to mention the S.E.C. mandating the use of XBRL as a data standard for sharing key corporate financial data. Tut, tut.

On a positive note I direct your attention to point 2 on page 118 that begins:

One of the most important enablers of value creation from big data is combining data from multiple sources…

and goes on to outline how data sharing may need to be mandated in order to highlight or prevent systemic risk.

Clearly the increasing importance of analysing big data will not only require new technologies but also new job roles. Here in the UK, the word ‘scrubber’ has a rather derogatory connotation. But in the world of big data, ‘data scrubbers’ are one of the new and highly necessary job roles. In essence you can take almost any job role today, stick ‘data’ in front of it, and it becomes respectable.

Yet apparently, deep methodological questions remain:

Measuring volumes of data provokes a number of methodological questions. First, how can we distinguish data from information and from insight? (p.16)

Here’s my humble take on this complex methodological question that has taxed some of the greatest minds of the century:

100. That’s data.

100 prunes for dessert. That’s information.

Never again. That’s insight.

But as Paul Baier at GreenBiz points out (with a few spelling errors):

When reading traditional annual reports, financial analysis (sic) quickly skim pass (sic) the glossy pictures, platitudes, CEO letter and other marketing fluff and head straight to the financial numbers and footnotes.

Savvy CSR report readers do the same. The value is in the numbers.

So it’s also good to hear that the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) are working even closer together to maintain an explanatory mapping between each other’s sustainability and emissions indicators. That way the text and the numbers in GRI Index reports are more easily compared with those in CDP emissions reports.

Of course what would be even better is if those numbers could be standardized by referencing a single XBRL sustainability taxonomy. Then ‘scope 1′ emissions in a GRI report would always mean the same as ‘scope 1′ emissions in a CDP report – no matter what actual stakeholder report the number ended up in.

Carol’s pentad looks like this:

Carol Sandford's pentad

It struck me that XBRL is really only addressing one arm (or is it ‘glitter’ on a star?) of the ‘quintuple bottom line’ the pentad represents – namely investors. That’s fine if all you see XBRL doing long-term is satisfying some financial curiosity about the way a company works. But some of us think that XBRL might be a good way of addressing other panes of the transparency window. That way all kinds of transparency data can be communicated in a controlled and responsible way.