In hopes of stepping up its effort to get companies to file their financial reports using interactive data, the Securities and Exchange Commission is sweetening the pot for companies that volunteer to be part of a test group with a plan to offer expedited reviews of registration statements and annual reports.
The move comes roughly nine months after the April 2005 SEC launch of a voluntary filing program under which corporate or mutual fund registrants can file their financial information with the Commission in XBRL—short for extensible business reporting language—a computer language that makes financial data interactive. Since the launch of the initiative, the SEC has only received 22 XBRL filings from nine companies. SEC officials admit that the response isn’t quite what they had hoped.
