I love round-up articles. You know, those pieces so beloved by editors that give a snapshot of a topic from different perspectives. That’s why this one - Regulators are champions of XBRL – fresh and pink in the Financial Times, caught my eye.

First there was the old chestnut of XBRL being a solution looking for a problem. As if financial information transparency wasn’t a big enough problem for the world right now. Then despite a nod to XBRL’s own Tacoma Archimedes – Charlie Hoffman – it is regulators who are claimed to be the ‘innovators’ of XBRL.

(This is in contrast to that other well-known son of Tacoma, Jimi Hendrix, who was a problem in search of a solution. Unfortunately he never found it. But many of us got a great deal of benefit from his search…)

Certainly XBRL wouldn’t have got as far as it has without the take-up by regulators around the world but they are hardly the innovators. Rather, to their credit, what regulators around the world realized was that XBRL helps them to lower their costs, improve their business processes and do their core tasks more effectively. Everything that taxpayers should expect from an effectively run public-sector organization.

XBRL is claimed to be a ‘chore’ for businesses. Yet large numbers of them are apparently unaware of it. This is particularly the case in the UK where the spectre of filing in iXBRL to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has apparently gone ‘completely under the radar’ (is that sonar?) And perhaps there’s a good reason for that. Most businesses in the UK don’t actually care about filing in iXBRL.

This is because many businesses file to HMRC via their accountants. So it is their accountants who have to care. If a UK accountant isn’t aware of the new iXBRL filing requirement then he should be struck off – it’s his business to know and deal with it. And if a business itself opts to file online via the HMRC web service then the iXBRL file is generated for them automatically. Alternatively a business can choose neither of these two options and figure out how to generate iXBRL themselves. As if.

But surely this new iXBRL filing burden is going to cost hard-pressed UK businesses a lot of dosh? Well it shouldn’t. Because as David Forbes rightly points out in the FT article, it should be just a question of accountants (or more likely their clerks) ticking a box in their accounts production software that says ’send in XBRL’. Which is basically like that option ‘print as PDF’ in a word processor – another onerous task that I don’t recall anyone getting aerated about and predicting ‘rough’ years ahead for word processing.

Undoubtedly some wicked software vendors may try to charge extra for that little tick box. But for most it will probably just be a maintenance release covered under their annual support agreement. In the meantime however, it’s in the interests of both the accounts production software sector and the compliance consulting industry for this iXBRL stuff to be blown out of all proportion. Then they can run lots of seminars about how their application magically removes this new burden from the shoulders of users of their software/service. I’ll be going to one next week – just in case I’ve missed something.

Someday, someone is going to write a fascinating book about the myths and legends of XBRL but for now we should just sit back and enjoy as the narrative plays out before our very eyes.

Share your thoughs: http://blog.rivetsoftware.com/2010/01/29/myths-and-legends-of-xbrl/.