On January 18th I wrote an article discussing how the proposed adoption of XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) will drive up compliance costs and provide auditing firms with another revenue stream. Well, according to this article at CFO.com, an SEC advisory committee is paving the way for the regulator to require companies to turn their traditional financial statements into more easily searchable, comparable, and interactive documents.
If the SEC takes the committee's advice, all U.S. publicly traded companies could be required to file audited XBRL financial statements in three years. Reading further, it looks like I'm not the only one who sees higher audit fees in the future.
"At Monday's meeting, Peter Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, tried to assuage committee members' fears that the use of XBRL could lead to high assurance costs for companies hiring auditors to check that they have tagged data correctly."
It's fairly obvious that this is a done deal, and anyone who voices concerns over higher assurance costs will simply be ignored. Vendors are already lining up to provide XBRL implementation services, and audit firms are right behind them. I know this sounds cliche, but I can hear CFOs everywhere mumbling that "the hits just keep on coming."
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