A group of technology panies sent a letter Wednesday to leaders of the House Financial Services mittee objecting to legislation that would exempt panies with under $250million in annual revenue from existing requirements to file financial statements as machine-readable open data.

The mittee approved the legislation in March,but it has not yet been passed in the House (see House Panel Approves Bill Exempting Small panies from XBRL Requirement).The financial tech panies include Edgar Online,Calcbench,Enigma,FindTheBest and Tagnifi.They have united under the umbrella of a lobbying group called the Data Transparency alition.In the letter,they called on the House Financial Services mittee to direct the Securities and Exchange mission to fully enforce the quality of the financial disclosure data it llects,rather than eliminate open data reporting for most public panies.

“H.R.4164is based on a flawed diagnosis that blames open data tools for the symptoms of poor data quality,”said Data Transparency alition executive director Hudson Hollister.“Instead of decimating this critical data set,ngress should direct the SEC to s aepting inaurate submissions,so the data set bees useful.Once the data set can be analyzed without stly rrections,analysts will be able to expand their verage,and smaller public panies will get more attention.Our capital markets want quality data—not less of it.”

Under H.R 4164,the Small pany Disclosure Simplification Act,the SEC would s requiring financial reports formatted in Extensible Business Reporting Language,or XBRL,from panies under $250million in annual revenue,going back to a document-based system.The exemption would remove about 60percent of publicly traded panies from the XBRL requirements,which the SEC originally mandated in 2009in phases and now ver all U.S.public panies and issuers.

Wednesday’s letter asks House Financial Services mittee chairman Jeb Hensarling,R-Texas,and ranking member Maxine Waters,D-Calif.,to modify the proposal to direct the SEC to enforce data quality.If the SEC delivered more reliable data,the alition ntends,panies would be able to benefit from expanded and more st-effective verage.

“If the quality of the data improved,investors and markets uld use it without extensive rrection and small issuers would benefit from expanded analyst verage,”said the letter from the alition.“We hope the mittee will nsider such an approach before H.R.4164is nsidered on the floor of the House.”

The group noted that throughout the world,ernments are adopting structured data formats such as XBRL to allow disclosure information to flow automatically into analysis systems,without needing to be expensively re-keyed or optically regnized.

“Investors and markets are demanding information as structured,open data rather than disnnected documents,”said the alition,pointing out that last month ngress unanimously passed the Digital Acuntability and Transparency Act,or DATA Act,into law,requiring the federal ernment to adopt structured data formats for its own financial information (see ngress Passes DATA Act).President Obama signed the bill into law on May 9.

“To be useful to investors and markets,however,structured data must be aurate,”said the group.“The SEC adopted XBRL for financial statements in 2009,but still has not begun requiring filers to address material errors in these filings.Inadvertent yet damaging errors,such as flipped positive and negative signs and misplaced decimal points,are mon throughout the SEC’s XBRL data set.The data set requires extensive rrection before it is useful.Thus,the chief advantages of structured data over document-based disclosure—automated usability and large-scale investment analysis of large and small panies—have not been realized in the United States.”

中文新闻：http://www.xbrl-cn.org/2014/0611/103090.shtml