Continuing the series on ten areas I had hoped XBRL would help.

We are officially in the 20^th anniversary month for XBRL. On October 14, 1999, we (then known as XFRML rather than XBRL) kicked off at the AICPA offices in New York. Two weeks later, at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, committees were set up and the effort was underway.

I attended a Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF)/Data Coalition event on October

24: “GLEIF Washington Forum: Accelerating into a Digital Future: Simplifying Entity

Identification for the Digital Age”. If you are unfamiliar with the LEI, this is what GLEIF says

about LEI:

The audit opinion is largely perceived as black and white, go and no-go. But most decision makers understand that waiting for black and white confidence may give you information too late. American political and retired four-star general Colin Powell is noted in decision-making circles as remarking that a decision made after having 70% confidence means the window of opportunity has already started to close.

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.

(click on the title to read the full article)

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.

(click on the title to read the full article)

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.