The Maryland Association of CPAs launched its new Center for Transparency, Performance, Management and Accountability using XBRL (TPMAx), with a special XBRL Thought Leader Symposium today.
The aim of the center, which is designed as a collaborative community for exploring new ways to use structured financial data, is to serve as a central place to gather best practices, share learning and help support innovative applications of standardized financial data such as that in the Extensible Business Reporting Language.
The new center recently held its first collaboration session and identified the top five ways XBRL and structured financial data could have the biggest impact:
• Meeting the needs of financial information users, such as the SEC and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
• "Open government" reporting like the federal DATA Act, health care, and government spending data for citizens.
• Standardized business reporting to federal and state governments to reduce compliance and reporting burdens.
• Performance management, key performance indicators, and transparent internal business reporting.
• Increasing transparency and accountability in the capital markets and the SEC mandate.
MACPA will also have a number of sessions on XBRL at its
MACPA has pioneered its own application of XBRL internally, and is now working with the Financial Accounting Standards Board on an XBRL taxonomy for not-for-profit organizations.
MACPA's director of finance, Skip Falatko, CPA, CGMA, who led the association's application of XBRL, said, "Standardizing our data with XBRL allowed us to rethink our data stores and redeploy technology to liberate data in a way that makes it more accessible, transparent, and much, much more powerful to analyze in an almost real-time way. This allows our team to be able to make informed, data-driven decisions in a real-time way."
The association is a member of XBRL US and the Data Transparency Coalition. It has 9,000 members.
