The Obama Administration has made unprecedented promises of openness and transparency in government. One of the keys to realizing that promise may lay in a computer machine language already in use by the world's banks, corporations and two federal financial regulatory agencies.

At present, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is making use of XBRL, (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), to process some reports now filed by very large banks. Similarly, the Securities and Exchange Commission is in the midst of a pilot program requiring small to medium corporation to submit their financials in electronic format, with the tags of XBRL included in the data.

But what is XBRL?

We posed that question to Joe Kull, a director in the Washington office of Price Waterhouse Coopers, and a former Deputy Controller for Federal Financial Management at the Office of Management and Budget.

XBRL is an extension of XML, which is a machine language that allows computers to talk to each other. What XBRL does is that it allows data to be added to that scheme, regardless of the platform.

Kull says that just as XML makes it possible for text and graphics to be displayed and rendered across different kinds of personal computers and different web browsers across the Internet, XBRL makes it possible to move, display and analyze huge sets of mostly financial and business data across different platforms and software applications for different end results.

Last fall, Kull co-authored a report for the Association of Government Accountants outlining a demonstration program in Oregon, where AGA wanted to see how XBRL could be used to tag the state's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. "We wanted to see what it would take to develop a taxonomy that would allow for the tagging of that kind of information."

It should be noted that XBRL is an open standard developed by volunteer teams of programmers in Europe for purposes of massaging large datasets of financial and business information. Kull says if properly implemented, XBRL holds the potential to revolutionize government agency financial reporting in ways few have envisioned.

For some added perspective, we turned to Van Daniker, the executive director AGA, which helped commission the Oregon CAFR/XBRL demonstration project. He sees the need for timely reporting on stimulus spending and heightened interest in XBRL as the convergence of two forces for good government financial reporting.

Daniker says that a pilot project featuring states and localities, as well as the federal government, could test the rigor of XBRL to handle the volumes and volumes of economic data that could flood into the servers as stimulus money is spent.