Correspondence: Eric E. Cohen, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 1100 Bausch and Lomb Plaza, Rochester, New York 14604 USA.E-mail: eric.e.cohen@us.pwc.com

¹is the XBRL Global Technical Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. One of the original founders of XBRL, Mr Cohen has served in many leadership and technical roles within the organization. He is a prolific author and speaker, and ambassador of XBRL to other groups, including numerous standards organizations and governmental entities. Mr Cohen serves on numerous professional committees for the AICPA, the CICA and the IMA. Mr Cohen's professional interests include continuous auditing, data level assurance, and formalising the assurance reliance supply chain.

Received 16 March 2009; Revised 16 March 2009.

Abstract

With the January 2009 mandate by the US Securities and Exchange Commission of Interactive Data, as well as other governmental mandates and opportunities for compliance burden reductions globally, the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is becoming a more common and necessary part of corporate governance and compliance. Due to this external pressure, as well as the primary focus of XBRL advocates themselves to encourage governmental adoption of XBRL for compliance reporting, another important deliverable from XBRL International, Inc. – XBRL's Global Ledger Framework (XBRL GL) – and its obvious and immediate benefits to organisations has been given much less visibility than the external focused efforts; however, XBRL GL has the potential to bring more measurable benefit to companies, in addition to helping support the benefits regulators and the markets receive from more transparent external reporting. XBRL GL serves as a metadata hub (to facilitate system interoperability), as a common face to data from different systems (facilitating common toolsets and controls) and as a tool to enable a seamless audit trail, spanning gaps between systems. XBRL GL seamlessly integrates incoming transactions and external facing reports, acting as a bridge, a single, holistic, generic view of data. While companies can continue to choose proprietary approaches, and while the XBRL Specification itself is sometimes used as the basis for those approaches, it is a proper combination of XBRL GL with XBRL for external reporting that may offer the greatest benefit to companies. While XBRL GL has some obvious potential benefits, the risk to companies and to the market as a whole is that lack of adoption of XBRL GL will lead to a proliferation of proprietary standards at different points in the Business Reporting Supply Chain and for different consumers, such as the world's tax regulators, leading to more confusion and burden instead of providing holistic solutions that provide benefits for all. Those responsible for corporate governance have a responsibility to make sure that interoperability solutions are being chosen with an eye on long-term value, and not just the easiest solution in the short term.