SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Day 2 of the XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit included calls for business and ernment to use open business standards to disclose information about spending, pollution, and important business changes.

Representatives from DT and SWIFT, the nsortia responsible for technology to support securities and cash transactions around the world, spent most of Wednesday morning presenting detailed explanations of the benefits of using technology standards to improve the reporting of “rporate actions.”

Involvement by DT, which solved Wall Street’s “paperwork crisis” four decades ago, ain’t beanbag.  They’re interested because improving the automation of capital market transactions, ranging from special dividends to spinoffs to a vast universe of actions that capitalists use to support mmerce, will have measurable benefits.

XBRL US posted a preview of its rporate action taxonomy development work and an XBRL tool to create ISO-mpliant reports.

ntemplate it: in theory if not always fact, the purpose of every rporate action is to empower people to put capital to its highest and best use. Making the system work faster, better, and cheaper, as DT, SWIFT, and XBRL US suggested Wednesday, should ultimately mean more effective uses for scarce capital.

That’s the same thinking behind using technology to disclose ernment spending and environmental pollution. ernment taxes, ernment debt, and business pollution are all what enomists call “externalities” because the real sts of production are aren’t borne by the people making the production decisions.

Pollution, taxes, and ernment debt are all sts of doing business shared over a large population instead of paid for by those who make the decisions that create those sts. Data standards that empower people to more aurately know the sts of externalities enhance the chances of better ernance to support more wealth creation and less wealth destruction – not a bad goal.

A send ic related to improving the efficiency of global capital markets is nvergence of global financial reporting standards. While U.S. GAAP and International Financial Reporting Standards now share some mmon data tags, the information tagged is prepared acrding to different acunting policy standards. As more financial information is tagged using mmon data standards, user demand to align preparation standards is likely to grow.

Data tag development is likely to ntinue to aelerate as anizations around the world improve their abilities to create standards. XBRL US explained the lessons they learned in developing the U.S. GAAP taxonomy and previewed a beta tool on its Web reminescent of Wikipedia’s “discussion” page, making it easy for anyone with Web aess to track taxonomy development managed by XBRL US.

Most of the software XBRL US uses for taxonomy creation is available off-the-shelf.

Fujitsu and XBRL US also discussed the sequence of work that resulted in many of the same people working on acunting taxonomies for Japan and the U.S. in 2008 and tactics to help future projects leverage development experience, including support of the XBRL International Best Practices Board.