U.S. GAAP XBRL almost ready

By Dominic Jones

THE XBRL taxonomy for U.S. GAAP will be ready July 24, but there are questions about the complexity of the new reporting language, reports CFO.com.

Rob Blake, vice president of domains and taxonomy at XBRL US, told the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council yesterday that the GAAP XBRL tag library will have about 12,000 different elements. That compares to 1,000 tags for International Financial Reporting Standards.

CFO.com says some observers have expressed concern about the complexity of using XBRL and how this might slow down adoption. Robert DeSantis, president of the Financial Accounting Foundation is quoted saying: “It’s not going to be all that meaningful until it’s being used in the market.”

The incentive for companies to use XBRL may well be driven by internal rather than external reporting benefits. United Technologies Corp. saved 145 hours by using XBRL in its most recent 10-Q filing, according to an article published in the June issue of the Journal of Accountancy.

See related article: Ready for a Test Drive: XBRL Financial Tags (CFO.com)

Please Support Our Work
Email your friends about us. Subscribe to our paid publication Online IR Trends Quarterly. Get us to recommend improvements to your IR website (we're really good at it).