I have altered a joke made popular by the 1973 television series “The Odd Couple”, when Tony Randall, as Felix Unger, is in court and rebukes a witness by saying “never assume”. The writer for the show credited the line to a teacher in his typewriting class; a Google Books search finds an obscure 1967 reference in publications of the US National Safety Congress.

Like the problems with assuming, presumption has its challenges. I have heard the term in two different contexts related to accounting and audit.

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When XBRL was in its infancy, much of my attention was spent trying to improve the intersection between the auditor’s report and management’s financial statement.

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Dr. Seuss’s last book, on life’s journey and challenges, inspires the headline of this blog entry. As I last wrote on looking back on the twenty years since the FASB and IASC efforts to document the current state of Internet-based reporting and perhaps guess where the Internet might take corporate reporting, I also had time to think back on twenty years of XBRL.

A twenty-two year old graduating from university has never known a day without the Web (other than limitations to their own access). The electronic distribution of information is the de facto method for most purposes. Phone books, newspapers, books, magazines, paper mail – all moving to electronic distribution.

After years of collaborating with a group called Libra, that group more recently changed its name – and shortly afterward, it became clear why: a social media giant had bought the name to establish its own cryptocurrency, Libra.

On Sunday, August 11, I am scheduled to be part of a workshop at the American Accounting Association (AAA) National Conference about the transition in the United States from “traditional” XBRL to Inline XBRL.