Technology

Editor’s note: The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to publish a rule mandating XBRL technology for financial statements as soon as this fall. To hear how much of a challenge XBRL implementation can be, we caught up with four financial reporting executives at companies that have already been participating in the SEC’s voluntary pilot XBRL […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission can mandate use of XBRL technology for financial reporting all it wants. Ultimately, however, the investing public must take one key action to make companies’ investments in XBRL worth all that time and money. They must trust that XBRL-tagged numbers work. That’s where validation—the art of confirming that, yes, all […]

Corporate America is generally voicing support for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule to mandate that corporations file financial statements using XBRL technology, although a few gripes remain about the timetable for adoption and about the difficulty of handling footnotes. The comment period for the rule proposal closed Aug. 1. All signs indicate the […]

Another flurry of IT security rules to protect consumers’ credit card data went into effect this month—not that they will be much help to bewildered and frustrated retailers across the country. As of July 1, PCI Industry Data Standard 6.6 gave merchants a framework to ensure that point-of-sale information uploaded into Web-based applications is protected […]

Explaining IT risk to senior executives and board directors in a meaningful way has always been difficult for computer folks. Now two major independent efforts to bridge the language gap have begun, with a third to follow later this year. Both the Open Group—long a major force in software standardization—and the International Organization for Standardization […]

A new Compliance Week survey suggests that most of Corporate America is barely aware of XBRL, the financial reporting technology the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to mandate later this fall. The SEC has already published a proposal to mandate XBRL for all companies by 2011, and for Fortune 500 companies as soon as […]

As the Securities and Exchange Commission marches toward the mandatory adoption of XBRL technology, it is hearing encouraging words from its counterparts around the globe already using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Participants at a June 10 SEC roundtable generally praised XBRL and had no major complaints about their experience implementing the financial reporting standard. […]

Three years ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced a financial reporting “tagging” concept called eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Seventeen pioneers—including 3M Company, Altria Group, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Xerox—volunteered to file their financial statements using XBRL, to see what this new technology could do. Fast forward to today. On May 14, the SEC voted […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has released the details of its proposal to mandate XBRL technology for financial filings and begun a full-court press to get a rule passed as quickly as it can. The 143-page release was published May 30 and is now open for public comment until Aug. 1. The SEC included dozens […]

Today’s IT solutions are complex, and they are getting more challenging to implement all the time. One of the great questions for management at any company these days is simply whether all the investment in those systems is worth it. Internal auditing can play a critical role there, measuring and inspecting how the IT investment […]