Alerts

SEC Proposes Mandatory XBRL Tagging

May 30, 2008

On May 14, 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to propose new rules that would require public companies to provide their financial statements in an interactive format known as XBRL, which is short for “extensible business reporting language.” XBRL is a data-tagging technology that codes individual pieces of financial data with a unique identifier so that they are machine readable. XBRL tags would permit individual financial statement items to be more easily searched on the Internet, downloaded into spreadsheets and reorganized in databases, making it easier, and less expensive, for analysts and investors to compare and analyze public company financial information. The SEC’s rule proposal follows on three years of interactive data submission under the agency’s voluntary filer program.