Matt Kelly is editor-in-chief of pliance Week, a magazine and online newsletter on rporate ernance, risk, and mpliance. Prior to his role at pliance Week, Kelly was a reporter and ntributor on rporate mpliance and technology issues for magazines such as Time, Boston Business Journal, eWeek, and numerous other publications.

To the best of my knowledge, XBRL has no tag for “disinterest.” That’s unfortunate, since it seems to be the adjective that best fits the U.S. Securities and Exchange mission these days.

Yes, large U.S. mpanies must begin filing financial statements tagged in XBRL technology starting June 15. Yes, that’s because the SEC approved an XBRL mandate months ago after years of telegraphing its intention to do so. And yes, the plain truth is that most large filers will muddle through their first XBRL submissions without llapsing into chaos or bankruptcy.

Still, at what should be a proud hour for XBRL, enthusiasm has faded. We’re filing. Oh. Yippee.

The culprit here is new SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. Given America’s current enomic plight, she has astutely identified XBRL for what it is: the financial reporting equivalent of tidying up the front lobby for visitors, while the back of the mpany crumbles to the ground. Schapiro believes the SEC has much, much bigger problems to worry about than XBRL and the promise of easier mparison of financial data — and she’s right. The agency’s enforcement arm is a mess; the Obama Administration has proposed parceling out most SEC functions to the Federal Reserve or other agencies-to-be-named later as part of Washington’s wholesale regulatory reform. Now is not the time for the SEC to be worrying about tags.

William Lutz, director of the SEC’s 21st Century Disclosure Initiative, admitted as much at a May 28 nference discussing the future of XBRL. “A lot of the mmission’s resources are turned internally” right now, he said, leaving “limited resources” for XBRL. Lutz added that two XBRL projects planned for this year — one to tag the pensation Disclosure and Analysis and another to tag asset-backed securities — have been put off until next year, at least as far as SEC participation goes.

You can’t fault the SEC for putting its resources where they are needed. But it does undersre a fundamental problem with XBRL: adoption not only requires some specific vow of action; it requires maintenance, day in and day out, and that can be hard to deliver. Already, the XBRL taxonomy on the SEC’s web uses U.S. GAAP as of 2008 — not the updated taxonomy for 2009, which was released in April. And neither taxonomy inrporates Financial Acunting Standard No. 165, Acunting for Subsequent Events, approved by the Financial Acunting Standards Board only last week.

Will either of those glitches last very long? Probably not. Still, they probably will last until someone at the SEC decides to fix them — and with the new SEC leadership responding to new problems that will endure for quite a while, expect fewer people at the SEC to be thinking about XBRL.