XBRL Summit Day 3 — Eternal Business Questions Even XBRL Can’t Answer
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The day 3 agenda of the XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit was simple — approaches to tagging and “rendering” XBRL, data consistency, putting tagged data into databases, and something about “impact investing.”
But it generated complex questions:
• How can technologists help millions of data users get the different views of the same data they want?
• How can complex businesses reconcile diverse software systems to reduce the burden of preparing financial reports for banks, investors, and regulators?
• What does better data mean to the heretofore binary choice between for-profit and non-profit investing?
From “template-based tagging” to “social return on investment,” day three ran from practical to idealistic. With XBRL’s seemingly contradictory delivery of more structure to accounting and more dynamism to business, the summit’s concluding day — surely by design — left participants with more questions than answers.
Early XBRL skepticism focused on the capabilities of computers to process and convey the meaning of vital judgments by professional accountants. That’s largely been addressed, but how the discipline of computer programming might change the accounting judgment ecosystem — not to mention the ecosystem for investors and analysts — remains an open question.
Professional capability to leverage the accumulation of discipline that necessarily accompanies data tagging remains disproportionally in the possession of elites who work on big corporate disclosures, for the obvious reason that only big companies have been subjected to mandatory filing. As more professionals get comfortable with XBRL, demand for the standard as a tool of convenience for preparers and accuracy for users is sure to grow.
Better data about investments for financial investors is likely to lead to similar demands from philanthropic investors. Salesforce.com Foundation Director of Innovation Steve Wright outlined work to use XBRL standards to improve “impact investing .”
Wright showed the conference a version of economics’ “production possibility frontier,” with social returns on the vertical axis and financial returns on the horizontal access. Without mentioning it, Wright exposed a shortcoming in U.S. tax law. Today, the IRS requires entities to make a binary choice between profit and non-profit status. But in the real world, entrepreneurs can have mixed motives. Many create entities not just to make profits but because they want to do good things for the world.
The work-around for that binary rule is for companies to do what Salesforce.com has done — organize a separate non-profit entity to handle its charitable work. But does a government-built wall between non-profit and for-profit activity divert resources from economically and socially valuable activity to costly tax compliance? Can technology empower mixed-motive investors to operate on the PPF to maximize financial and social returns on their investment? Do corporate taxes even make sense in a structured data world in which it may be possible to track how tax burdens are shared by investors, workers, and customers? Or are there more efficient ways to maximize returns on financial and social investment?
Again, more questions than answers.
Several presenters highlighted the convenience of the SEC’s XBRL RSS feed, which now makes some of the most valuable data collected by the government available in real time to anyone with an Internet connection. The SEC’s precedent should inspire ambition among its fellow regulators.
The power of Internet technology to move the next big thing into the spotlight shouldn’t be underestimated. One surprising discovery by XBRL expert Diane Mueller that she reported today: A Milwaukee mutual fund has already filed its schedule of investments in XBRL.
Making mutual fund holdings more transparent helps investors; detailed holding information is essential to measure mutual fund manager performance. To the extent voluntary disclosure seeds investor demand for more disclosure, it increases the incentives of fund managers to find the most efficient ways to put investors’ capital to work.
Markets run on information. Making it easier to find and use information makes markets run better. How does that happen? The answer to that question depends not on XBRL, but on how people use XBRL. That was the last panel’s question — but it’s unlikely to find a final answer today.
