posted by Diane Mueller
In an article posted today on Wired.com, Daniel Roth interviews Phil Moyer of EDGAR-Online and Charlie Hoffman and comes to the realization that XBRL is a radical and innovative technology that changes the game for finanical reporting. As he aptly notes " Even the regulators can't keep up. A Senate study in 2002 found that the SEC had managed to fully review just 16 percent of the nearly 15,000 annual reports that companies submitted in the previous fiscal year; the recently disgraced Enron hadn't been reviewed in a decade." He points out the obvious - that plowing thru a ~500 page Bear Stearns prospectus isn't for the faint hearted and certainly not conducive to a transparent flow of information to the masses. The devil is in the detail and the detail has been tagged with XBRL.
Kudos for a great article, which I encourage everyone to read - Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now! by wired.com's Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com)
