An interesting article in the May 28, 2006 edition of CFO.com questions if the transmission of financial statements in XBRL is on its way to becoming mandatory. Up until now, the SEC has asked companies to participate in a voluntary program to submit SEC filings in XBRL format. At the close of the recent program, only 17 companies had submitted its financials in XBRL. As the article states:

Last October, SEC deputy chief accountant Andrew Bailey told CFO.com that the SEC might indeed want to make XBRL mandatory. That makes Cox's current campaign sound like a clear message to Corporate America. "It's pretty difficult to see the chairman of the SEC give XBRL that much play and not get the message that this is coming down the pike and it is not going to be optional," says Dan Roberts of Grant Thornton. Roberts is chair of the XBRL-US Steering Committee, part of an industry consortium working to develop XBRL in the United States.

So far, that work has been voluntary — and slow. Although XBRL, which stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, has been under development in this country for more than five years, it has yet to have much of an impact on financial reporting. "The United States is, to its potential detriment, significantly behind other major markets in its adoption of XBRL," says Roberts.

Indeed, a pilot program by the SEC to encourage companies to report their financial results in XBRL has attracted only 17 companies. And while International Financial Reporting Standards include a full taxonomy — that is, XBRL tags for all major financial reporting line items — the tags for items involving U.S. generally accepted accounting principles are still being written. By some counts, that project, which includes some 3,000 tags, is less than half complete.

Based on these comments, it appears that companies ignore to the move to XBRL at their own peril.