A new report out from Columbia Business School is likely making anyone involved in the corporate reporting process feeling like they just spent months building a ballpark in a cornfield, only to find that no one seems to be showing up.
The report suggests that the massive and costly effort to attach identifying tags to financial information—known as eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL—might have been a colossal waste of time. That’s because the investors and analysts that were supposed to reap the benefits of XBRL through greater ability to compare and analyze financial information don’t seem to be using it.
