The spirit of the founding US Treasurer,Alexander Hamilton,seems alive and well at that agency.At the recent Financial Data Summit held in Washington,the Director of the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research,Dick Berner described the importance,to that agency,of rcing regulatory burden,describing the way that it aligns with efforts to improve data spe,quality and aessibility.

Berner says that in the United States,financial firms sometimes report the same or similar information to different regulators in different ways and through different technology platforms.This represents a “burden,a st and a source of frustration”…which seems like an elegant understatement to us.

These issues are,of urse,longstanding and a reflection that in the US,as in many (perhaps most)untries,the process of inter-agency llaboration is mplex and too often fraught with difficulty.

The OFR has been experimenting with ways to break down these barriers,running small,focused pilots that help surface problems and identify opportunities to improve.These pilots are helping agencies engage with industry and -operate with each other.

The OFR played a leading role in the creation of the LEI or Legal Entity Identifier and is a champion not just of standardised international identifiers,but financial data standardisation much more broadly.

The OFR is calling on agencies in the United States to embrace the LEI and other open,freely licensed standards such as XBRL,wherever they are appropriate,and Berner praised the actions of the US SEC in its recent steps to propose the mandatory use of Inline XBRL.

(He didn’t mention the llaboration between the GLEIF and XBRL International,but we expect to announce a global LEI taxonomy to ensure the nsistent use of the global identifier within XBRL documents in the ming months.)

Berner told the Financial Data Summit that the OFR would take steps to:

•improve data quality and rce reporting burden including by requiring standards,

•use precise and agreed-on definitions,identifiers,and formats;

•enurage industry-regulator agreement on essential data elements;

•enurage adherence to best practices in data llection;

•and enurage more data sharing among regulators.

To us that sounds like excellent advice for regulators,and industry professionals,worldwide.If pressed,we might add:

•use published,executable data quality rules to help ensure usability of data llected;

•manage data-definition versioning carefully,with open nsultation,and in a standardised manner;

•standardise,wherever possible,data rendering at a software independent,metadata level to help with mparability and nsistency in preparation and understanding;and

•expand industry llaboration to include industry software suppliers,in order to help with quality,st and timeliness.

It just happens that all of the above technical capabilities and best practices fall firmly into the world of XBRL reporting,so perhaps we are a little biased.

中文新闻：美财政部官员直言监管负担