A Dream for XBRL
by Gerald Trites

The CICA had its annual Corporate Reporting Awards in Toronto yesterday. The Awards program has been running for almost 60 years and its an understatement to say that there has been a lot of change over those years. In 2001, the Awards program was expanded to include Electronic Disclosure - basically how companies use their websites to disclose IR information.

A consistent theme of the judges reporting on electronic disclosure has been that companies often make it difficult for users to obtain the information they want, usually by burying it within huge pdf files, that take a long time to download and search.

This year, the judges cited a CICA research study expected to be released in the spring which takes a somewhat different approach to web disclosures. As the ED judging coordinator, I said the study will be taking the approach that the website should be viewed as a data mart. The data within the site is packaged largely according to packages that have evolved over a long period of time within the paper paradigm, such as financial statements, MD&A's and annual reports. We need to think of the availability of the data and question whether the traditional packages really do the job. We need to think of how that data can be repackaged to make it more useful to investors and other users. The website needs to be viewed holistically and the data availability made consistent across the site.

So here's the dream. That the data mart be totally organized and packaged by using XBRL. That  a single taxonomy be created for the presentation of website data marts that sweep in all the data that would be included on the IR section of a website. To be manageable, the architecture of such a taxonomy would likely have to incorporate, perhaps, by reference the existing financial statement taxonomies. This could be handled without great difficulty.

An XBRL reader would be included in the website so that the users would not have to look at XML style instance documents and this reader would be used to assemble the data the users want.

The advantages of this Website taxonomy would be impressive. It would enable instant access to all the details in the IR Section of a website, even within the notes to the financial statements. The information could be compared internally and with other companies.

Most importantly, the users would not have to dig through annual reports and big PDF documents to find the information they want. Why don't we do that?