The School of Business and Emporia State University received national publicity as a result of the fine efforts of the award winning XBRL Team. The Chairman of the SEC mentioned ESU and the XBRL Team in a speech at the International XBRL conference. Here is an excerpt:
Chairman Christopher Cox
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
14th International XBRL Conference
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
December 5, 2006
You may have heard that the SEC is waging an all-out war on accounting complexity. That's because today's overly complicated accounting standards are difficult for many filers - and can themselves be a source of accounting errors. But the noble work that the Financial Accounting Standards Board is undertaking to codify its standards, and reduce the level of accounting complexity, will take time. In the meanwhile, automating the process of applying today's excruciating accounting detail using XBRL can save companies valuable time and money, and get users of financial reports much more accurate information than they've ever had before.
And I should point out that not only can XBRL help reduce errors in the first place, but it can also help detect them after they occur. Here's an interesting example of how that might work. Just this year, a group of students at Emporia State University in Kansas won the Sixth Global XBRL Academic Competition at Bryant University by creating a software application that continuously identifies tagged transactions which should come to the attention of internal or external auditors. It's not hard to imagine that in the very near future, companies of all kinds will be able to rely on interactive data to flag anomalous data and fix accounting errors in real time.
In this example, as in so many others, the enormous contribution of interactive data is that it makes human beings more productive. Instead of spending time on backward-looking, manual re-checking of stale data, companies and their employees can spend more time on forward-looking, strategic thinking.
