XBRL Developers Release New Exposure Draft

New York (Oct. 28, 2002) -- The groups developing XBRL, a programming code for transmitting financial report information over the Internet, have released an exposure draft for an enhanced version of their original XBRL taxonomy, or specifications, for commercial-industrial businesses.

The draft, issued by the XBRL-US Domain Group and the American Institute of CPAs, can be viewed at http://www.xbrl.org/Taxonomy/us/TaxonomyFrameworkOverview.htm . The groups ask that CPAs review the draft and submit their comments by Nov. 29 to Rob Blake, XBRL-US Domain Group chairman, at robblake@microsoft.com, or the AICPA's XBRL point person, Jeff Naumann at jnaumann@aicpa.org .

The latest draft enhances an original C&I XBRL taxonomy by factoring in 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 the XML for financial reports. Very specific items of data from financial reports formatted in XBRL can be almost instantaneously retrieved by a broad number of constituencies, including regulators, lenders and investors, to name a few.

The XBRL-US Domain Group, which is responsible for developing XBRL standards for this country, is among national XBRL groups at work in about ten different countries. The groups all are part of XBRL International, an AICPA-led consortium that's been developing the XBRL concept since the late 1990s.

--John M. Covaleski

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