Around 2005, the SBIF (Superintendency of Banks and Financial Institutions) and the SVS (Superintendency of Securities and Insurance) started to discuss XBRL. They were the first Chilean institutions to do so.

Six years later, the SBIF has made no concrete progress; it is still just talking about XBRL. Banco Central de Chile (Central Bank of Chile) and Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago (Santiago Stock Market) have expressed interest in XBRL, but that is the extent of their involvement.

Meanwhile, the SVS implemented the Chilean taxonomies based on the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) Foundation, starting with SVS CL-CI 2008. However, XBRL technology is being used only by a few software companies and some advanced users. It is still far from reaching the promised level of transparency for financial information.

Take, for example, the recent La Polar crisis of confidence in retail markets. La Polar (Empresas La Polar SA ) is a regulated retail company that mishandled customer debt for years. This mishandling inflated its stock prices. Yet La Polar used XBRL to report to SVS for the last two years.

Who validated La Polar's reporting? Who audited its financial statements? Why did nobody detect its crisis, whether before or after XBRL was used in its financials? Given the lack of effect that XBRL had on La Polar, how can we say that transparency bestows any advantage at all?

Just making taxonomies and collecting files does not produce a more transparent market. SVS established conditions for regulated companies to report in XBRL, but it did not monitor the process as it affected real numbers and real companies.

Before IFRS, the SVS provided regulated companies with free software tools such as the SEIL for filling out forms. The reporting format was pretty much ad hoc. The SVS then took the files generated by these software tools and turned them into .pdf files.

Currently, because XBRL is an open and international standard, every regulated company has to provide its own reporting tool. The SVS posts announcements on the IFRS section of its web, waiting for companies to take up the XBRL. Still, as soon as deadlines arrive, crises spring up everywhere.

• Some companies objected to XBRL's "complexity," saying that XBRL allows only basic financial statements to be filed, not the notes Some companies said they were able to report only the basic financial statements, not the notes, due the complexity of the XBRL implementation for notes– and the notes contain the largest part of IFRS taxonomies. The SVS accepted this and allowed the notes to be optional for all companies. Only one of several hundred companies sent notes in any case. Thus the SVS lost relevant information that it used to gather with the aid of SEIL tools and disseminated to investors as well as the general public. Transparency, in this case, translated to less information.

• Some companies sent their reports only in .pdf form, because they had heard news only of IFRS, not of XBRL.

• Some companies used demo XBRL tools and some used IT consultants to prepare their XBRL reports. Unfortunately, the data in the resulting reports had the wrong information.

• In a very few cases, companies sent XBRL financial reports in .pdf form. Only in a few cases the companies sent information consistent in both formats: PDF and XBRL.

Were there any penalties for companies that did not send their reports? How about penalties for companies that sent the wrong information? Did the SVS admit any mistakes in their strategies or change them? While I was there, none of this occurred.

I would like to see the SVS give XBRL the importance that it deserves. However, I doubt that will happen until their customers, their users, and the public call out for it. I hope that their users don't wait for more La Polar-type tragedies before they make their voices heard, making politicians seethe with rage calling for greater transparency – but without admitting to their earlier laziness and neglect.