XBRL US has written a letter to Chairman Darrell Issa of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the US House of Representatives in support of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA) of 2011, H.R. 2146. This legislation calls for the creation of a Financial Accountability and Spending Transparency (FAST) Board to collect information on US government spending and requires reporting entities to submit it using a common data standard. Although the legislation as written does not require the use of XBRL, it does reference it as an example of a common data standard.

According to a statement on Congressman Issa's website, the DATA Act will establish an independent body to track federal spending, including grants, contracts, loans and agencies' internal expenses, on a single electronic platform, using consistent reporting standards and data identifiers and making all of the information available to the public. It includes these reforms:

(1) Establishing a universal standard of recipient reporting for money received from the federal government directly to an independent database.

(2) Collecting all agency expenditure data and combining it with the recipient reported data.

(3) Creating a permanent successor to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the body established by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to ensure transparency, and giving that board similar powers to ensure all federal spending is transparent to the public.

(4) Directing the new FAST Board to establish common identifiers and consistent reporting standards for all federally collected data.

The XBRL US letter notes that XBRL is already in use by several U.S. government agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The letter states that "Expanding its use to other government agencies would ensure interoperability of systems and information and would allow for the leveraging of existing technologies and tools for both businesses and government."

The letter also says that the data standards model recommended in the DATA Act will likely become a standard in other reporting applications, both government and private sector, given the sheer volume of federal spending data. "The more reporting applications developed using the same data standard, the greater the streamlining, cost-reduction and time-savings that can be recognized."

The letter can be read at the XBRL US website.