SEC to decide whether XBRL will be mandatory in U.S.

The SEC will meet on December 17 to decide whether to make XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) mandatory for public company financial statement information.

In general, regulators claim that adopting XBRL will improve the efficiency and transparency of the public reporting process.

However, there is also the possibility that the push for XBRL may be put on hold indefinitely due to the current financial and economic crisis.

The introduction of XBRL enables automated processing of business information by software, eliminating laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison. Software can recognize the information in an XBRL document, select it, analyze it, store it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users.

XBRL can handle information in different languages and accounting standards. It can be adapted to meet different requirements and uses. Information can be transformed into XBRL by suitable mapping tools or it can be generated in XBRL by appropriate software.

Other countries, including Canada, France, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, India, Sweden and Singapore also have XBRL market implementations under way.