SEC to decide on mandatory financial report coding

By Emily Chasan

NEW YORK, Sept 25 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators will decide next year if companies should be required to file financial reports in a machine-readable computer code to make data more easily comparable, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said on Tuesday.

Cox has been encouraging companies to report financial data using extensible business reporting language (XBRL) tags that allow investors to more easily analyze the information in spreadsheet programs.

But many companies have hesitated amid concerns about XBRL's maturity and implementation costs.

Cox said the U.S. XBRL group has completed all its work on developing data tags for U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which represented "the removal of the last major obstacle that stood behind the world and interactive data."

At a news conference, Mark Bolgiano, president of XBRL US Inc, handed Cox a tiny data card with the code for thousands of tags for volumes of U.S. accounting classifications.

While the data tags are being reviewed by major accounting firms and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, Cox said the SEC and XBRL groups would work on promoting the format.

Cox said he has asked the staff in the SEC's main divisions and offices to make recommendations next spring on whether the use of XBRL should be required for all corporate disclosures.

The tags are expected to be publicly available in December, so more companies can try XBRL while preparing financial statements, Cox said.

Companies such as General Electric Co (GE.N), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and United Technologies Corp (UTX.N) are already participating in a SEC pilot program of about 40 companies that have voluntarily elected to file financial statements in XBRL.

Cox told reporters after the conference that the implementation costs for those companies had been minimal, ranging from about $5,000 to $25,000 dollars.

"People that are looking at financial results are able to have a level of depth not seen before," Phillip Moyer, president of EDGAR Online, the SEC's electronic filing system, said in an interview with Reuters. "It's a huge agreement among the accounting industry, the data industry, regulators and others that never existed before."

Reuters Group Plc RTR.L is a member of XBRL International, a consortium of about 480 companies and organizations that develop and promote the use of XBRL.