Some errors slip through while issuers skimp on interactive tools

It’s midway through earnings season and 61 mpanies (as of 5 pm today) have produced XBRL statements under the SEC mandate for reporting periods ending after June 15. The rest of the first 500 biggest mpanies should join the interactive data movement in the ming weeks. Acrding to early indications, all’s well with XBRL.

The bad news is few if any issuer webs are giving shareholders more than a basic view of XBRL statements while some errors may reveal the SEC hasn’t fully scaled up its review process.

More than 400 mpanies in the first wave still have to produce their first official XBRL statements. Many of them have to do so by August 10, which is the deadline for 10-Qs from calendar-year filers, or within their one-time-only 30-day grace period. Look out for amended 10-Qs (10-Q/As), which uld mark a mpany unable to produce XBRL statements the same day as its 10-Q.

Robert Krugman, formerly with Edgar Online and now vice president at TheMarkets.m, a large redistributor of institutional research, thinks the majority of mpanies will easily meet their XBRL deadlines without having to spend a lot of time or money. He says service providers like RR Donnelley and Edgar Online haven’t run into problems either.

A number of mpanies filed 10-Qs with XBRL after April 13, when the SEC’s voluntary XBRL program ended. CSX rporation’s July 15 quarterly report claimed the honor of being the first to use XBRL for a reporting period ending after June 15.

This Florida-based railway mpany was already mfortable with interactive data. CSX voluntarily submitted its 2008 10-K in XBRL and did a ‘trial run’ with its first quarter 10-Q. ‘Before either of those two filings, we had extensive nversations with our peers in the railroad industry to try and reach nsensus on how to ‘tag’ the data and we were generally suessful,’ says Missy Mucha, assistant ntroller.

Neal Hannon, senior XBRL nsultant at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Gilbane Group, is surprised that a lot of mpanies are using the 2008 XBRL taxonomy even though the 2009 taxonomy is now available and being aepted by the SEC.

Hannon has also noticed more anomalies than he expected, such as wrongly block-tagged footnotes which don’t appear as they should in an XBRL viewer. That uld annoy analysts and investors. ‘It tells me the SEC is still learning. They’re struggling with the volume of filings,’ Hannon says.

Most mpanies are doing the bare minimum with XBRL on their webs. ‘They’re mplying with the SEC rules by putting their XBRL statements on the web but they aren’t giving users any tools to play around with them,’ says Hannon, who remmends Bowne’s interactive viewer to get beyond the basics.

IR manager Rob Jabson at Biogen Idec, a Massachusetts biotech mpany, says making XBRL statements available on the mpany web was ‘a simple, smooth transition,’ even with the mpany’s 10-Q going out just two weeks after the end of the quarter on the same day as the earnings release. Biogen’s finance group was well prepared in terms of tagging and Thomson Reuters, which handles Biogen’s IR web, promptly put the XBRL online. ‘I really like the way it presents on the page,’ Jabson remarks.

Jabson believes putting more sophisticated XBRL tools on Biogen’s web uld benefit retail investors but he has no plans to do so because the mpany is over 90 percent institutionally held.

Mucha adds that CSX supports XBRL as a powerful tool for investors and analysts to mpare and review data. ‘However it is still in its infancy stage and will take time for the data to beme widely available and the tools to spread,’ she says.