Industry Group Creates XBRL Standards for Financial Reporting

As corporate reporting standards have been under intense scrutiny, a new method, the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), may be a remedy for the ills that have been plaguing Wall Street and corporate America as a whole.

These sentiments were expressed by a panel of financial leaders Thursday, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Morgan Stanley, Gartner and Thomson Financial, parent company of the publisher of this Web site.

They discussed how this new standard of corporate reporting will enable shareholders, analysts, the media and regulators to access and analyze financial information more quickly and easily.

"High-profile corporate failures have heavily underscored the need for consistency and clarity in the way companies report to investors and financial markets. The marketplace is demanding information that is timely, transparent and frequent, but providing aggregated information is costly, manual and error prone because of disparate systems, standards and reporting models," said Thomas Barrett, partner and global leader for XBRL-enabled corporate reporting services at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Now, a remedy is at hand. The future standard of corporate reporting will use XBRL, a universal Internet language that gives us the means to present transparent data, driving out the market rumor, suspicion, and guesswork of the past"

A consortium of 170 companies that includes PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., General Electric, Hitachi, IBM, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, Reuters, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), and InLand Revenue in the UK is globally adopting XRBL.

Additional information can be found at: www.pwcglobal.com/xbrl.

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Money Management Executive
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