Canada Brings up the Rear
By Gerald Trites

The International XBRL Conference in Paris ended on June 25 after three days of intensive discussion and informative sessions from governments, regulators, consultants, aggregators, publishers, academics and others. Each year, the XII conferences get richer with content and show amazing progress in the adoption of XBRL around the world.

A Canadian attending the conference is prompted to ask one simple question – Why is Canada so far behind the rest of the world? Don’t we realize that equity markets depend on current data and that much of the rest of the world is now or soon will be able to produce that data in a form that can be read and analyzed by any computer systems; that it can be analyzed with unprecedented speed and depth? That economies have globalized and that the free flow of information is of paramount importance? That we soon will not be able to compete?

We Canadians are stuck in the last vestiges of the Gutenburg era, while the rest of the world is speeding ahead with state-of-the-art technologies. Blame it on governments that lack foresight, or on regulators that feel they need to follow the US – at a safe distance - or on our branch plant mentality. Whatever the reasons, we are badly behind and we will pay a price for that.

At the conference, speakers from the US, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, China, Japan, Belgium and many others spoke of their programs that have, or are about to, involve the implementation of XBRL. David Blaszkowsky, Director of the SEC's Office of Interactive Disclosure in the US, spoke about their new filing requirements.

Ignacio Boixo, coordinator of the XBRL Network of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, spoke about the XBRL implementations of both the COREP (Basel II) and FINREP (IFRS) reporting frameworks which are now used in more than half of the member countries of the European Community.

Speakers from the Netherlands talked about the development of the taxonomy for the Netherlands Taxonomy Project (NTP), which involves a comprehensive adoption of XBRL across the government, so all filers can use XBRL for all their filings with government authorities. The savings from this approach, often referred to as Standard Business Reporting (SBR) will be many millions of Euros.

Paul Madden, the Program Director for Standard Business Reporting (SBR) in Australia, discussed their program, which is broadly similar to the NTP in the Netherlands and involves 12 government agencies, and the development of a single taxonomy for Australian businesses to report to government.

Andy Greener, an Enterprise Architect of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in the UK, gave a compelling presentation on their program to require all UK companies to file their tax returns in XBRL by next year. Companies House in the UK has already received over 100,000 filings in XBRL.

A speaker from the Federal Public Service, Finance in Belgium reported on a corporate tax return taxonomy development project for that country, which will lead to XBRL tax filings in Belgium. Two members of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) told of the implementation of XBRL-based filings by banks to the Reserve Bank.

Mr. Koji Yoshida, head for Disclosure Planning in the Tokyo Stock Exchange Inc., reported on their implementation of XBRL.

There were many others. XBRL is rapidly becoming the standard format for the reporting of financial and business information in stock exchanges, banks, tax departments and other government departments generally around the world.

We need to get moving.