TheCorporateCounsel.net

Late on Friday, the SEC posted a 143-page proposing release for its mandatory XBRL rulemaking. Based on a quick glance, here are some additional thoughts to the ones I blogged a few weeks ago based on what was said at the open Commission meeting:

1. The Proposed Liability Framework – During the open Commission meeting, it was unclear what liabilities might attached to filing in XBRL – giving the impression that this important issue had not been fully worked out yet. Now that we have the proposing release, we can see on page 60 that the SEC is proposing two very different standards – (i) that the interactive data be considered “furnished” as it is under the pilot program versus (ii) that it be considered “filed” as the “viewable interactive data as displayed through software available on the Commission’s Web site… would be subject to the same liability under the federal securities laws as the corresponding portions of the traditional format filing.” I guess this was a compromise to get the proposal out of the building.

Some of you may be asking – what did he just say? I know that this is confusing. The SEC’s proposal has different liability standards for the XBRL data itself and for the “viewable” data. The former is what the machines read; the latter is what humans read (yes, there is a difference – a big difference; more on this later). So, in other words, the raw XBRL data (the “non-viewable” XBRL data) would essentially carry forward the pilot program’s liability regime (but note that no liability for Section 12 has been added – the voluntary filers program didn’t have this immunity) – and the “viewable XBRL data” would have the same type of liability as the official HTML or ASCII filings have today (and so viewable data would be considered “filed”).

2. Late Filers and “Springback” of Current Status – Under the proposal, the financials in XBRL would be filed as an exhibit under Item 601 of Regulation S-K and be considered part of the company’s “official” filing, rather than as a supplement as is the case in the pilot program. Even though a company would lose its Form S-3, etc. eligibilty if it was late in filing its XBRL data, it could regain its current status once the XBRL information was filed. This is a new concept under the SEC’s regulatory framework. (And there is a proposed pair of 30-day grace periods for the first two years.)

3. Possible Alternative Regulatory Frameworks – As with most SEC proposing releases, the Staff does a great job of posing questions to help solicit comments. In the proposing release, I particularly like the list of questions beginning on page 26. Read them to help you better understand what XBRL is all about.

4. Costs – As Dominic Jones notes in his “IR Web Report,” costs are expected to go up significantly in Years 2 and 3 (when “deep-tagging” will be required) and then will decrease rapidly as each company develops its own customized templates that can be re-used.

5. Foreign Private Issuers – As Dominic notes, the proposed rules would not require foreign private issuers that prepare their financial statements in accordance with a variation of IFRS as issued by the IASB to provide XBRL. Foreign private issuers that provide financial information on Form 6-K or any financial information prepared with non-US GAAP that must be reconciled to US GAAP in the foreign private issuer’s ’34 Act reports will not have to be provided in XBRL.

Just added! We are excited that David Blaszkowsky, Chief of the SEC’s Office of Interactive Disclosure, has joined the panel for our July 16th webcast: “XBRL: Understanding the New Frontier.”

By the way, I’ve learned that the Bush Administration’s moratorium on rulemaking doesn’t apply to the SEC because the agency is considered “independent.” So it shouldn’t impact the SEC’s ability to propose and adopt rules whenever it sees fit (although the SEC may voluntarily decide to abide by the Administration’s edict).

XBRL: A New Enforcement Tool?

This recent Reuters article claims XBRL will help uncover suspicious trading and accounting patterns. The example in the article is the option backdating scandal which was based on a study of the information filed in Form 4s (note that Section 16 forms are not being proposed by the SEC to be tagged in XBRL; they already are tagged in XML). If you recall, uncovering backdating practices gathered steam after Professors Randall Heron and Erik Lie’s study, which gathered Form 4 data starting in ’96 – well before Section 16 reports were required to be electronically filed. The professors relied on the Thomson Financial Insider Trading database to obtain the datapoints necessary for their study (and Thomson filled its database manually until Section 16 reports were required to be filed electronically after SOX).

But if memory serves, the SEC’s Enforcement Staff has to work hard to break open a financial fraud case; it’s not typical that the Staff can discern that numbers are “funny” on their face – rather, the fraud is uncovered by digging beyond the information in the SEC filings. So I don’t think that just running the numbers in XBRL is gonna help much. Most analysts (and I presume the SEC Staff) have long had the technology to crunch numbers using computers. In fact, you can access 10 years worth of financials tagged in XBRL right now for all public companies on TryXBRL.com.

Anyways, I worry that this type of promise about XBRL benefits adds to the boatload of misinformation already swirling around XBRL – but maybe someone can give me some concrete examples to show otherwise? I am certainly not an XBRL expert.

Our June Eminders is Posted!

We have posted the June issue of our complimentary monthly email newsletter. Sign up today to receive it by simply inputting your email address!

– Broc Romanek