by John M. Covaleski
Nov. 29, 2002, is the deadline for CPAs to comment on the exposure draft on the latest development of the XBRL programming code for transmitting financial report information over the Internet.
The exposure draft for an enhanced version of the original XBRL taxonomy for commercial and industrial businesses can be viewed at
The XBRL-US Domain Group and the American Institute of CPAs, which issued the new draft in October, ask that all CPAs review it and submit their comments to Rob Blake, XBRL-US Domain Group chairman, at
The latest draft enhances an original C&I XBRL taxonomy by factoring in the new tags required by prospective users, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and new standards set by Internet industry regulators the World Wide Web Consortium. Since work on XBRL began, the WWWC has updated standards for all programming languages that are part of the Extensible Markup Language, or XML, family, according to an XBRL spokesman.
XBRL, whose development has been spearheaded by the AICPA, is XML for financial reports. Specific items of data from financial reports formatted in XBRL can be almost instantaneously retrieved by a number of constituencies, including regulators, lenders and investors, among others.
