ournew language

A mericAn i n s t i t u t e o f cer t i fi ed Pub l i c Acco u n tA n t s

The story of

our new language

Personalities, cultures, and politics combine to create

a common, global language for business

By Karen Kernan

based on a chronicle of Charles Hoffman and Louis Matherne

XBRL

A me r i c A n i n s t i t u t e o f cer t i fi ed Pub l i c Acco u n tA n t s

The story of

our new language

Personalities, cultures, and politics combine to create

a common, global language for business

2752-381

By Karen Kernan

based on a chronicle of Charles Hoffman and Louis Matherne

American Institute of Certied Public Accountants, Inc.

New York, NY 10036-8775

to make copies of any part of this work, please visit www.copyright.com or call

(978) 750-8400.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 BRAAS 0 9

INTRODUCTION

XBRL has been a journey of high and lows that met with great successes in 2008. We at the AICPA

are proud of the founding and original development of XBRL, and we made a critical decision in its

infancy to focus on broad-based support and a large footprint. We deﬁned success as (1) the accep-

tance of this new tool in the broad-based business and business-reporting community and (2) the use

of this tool in areas broader than just ﬁnancial statement information. Those two fundamental beliefs

grounded some early decisions that we believe will make XBRL a critical foundation for business and

government in the decades to come.

The ﬁrst critical decision was deciding to make XBRL intellectual property available in the public

domain. The belief of shared development and use made this decision easy, but it doesn’t take away

from the signiﬁcant impact it had on ensuring that XBRL wouldn’t become just a tool for ﬁnancial

reporting by CPAs for CPAs.

The second major decision was ultimately to give XBRL its own organizational standing outside

of the AICPA. This would allow non-CPAs an active role in nurturing and development. CPAs played

a critical role—the largest role and a leadership role—but not the sole role.

The fundamental decision to develop applications outside of ﬁnancial reporting—the broader

footprint previously mentioned—ensured that XBRL could be leveraged in the U.S. jurisdiction for

the reporting of all types of business information. Then Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

Chairman Chris Cox deserves credit for seeing the broader business reporting vision that led to his

support of the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) project through XBRL-US, Inc.,

the U.S. jurisdiction of XBRL International.

As XBRL moves forward, the broader footprint will result in projects focused on tax information,

business regulatory metrics, corporate actions, tracking of asset-backed securities, and even state-to-

state based regulatory models. All of these tasks can fully utilize the power of XBRL and its ability to

create and analyze common data.

2 The Story of Our New Language

This paper documents XBRL’s exciting journey to the present. With the continued support of and

involvement from broad parts of the business and government communities and a vision for broad

applications, 2009 will be remembered as the crucial next step in a long and prosperous journey.

Barry Melancon, CPA

President & CEO

American Institute of CPAs

THE EARLY YEARS

“This consortium thing—this is not me at all. People in consortiums have to agree, they have to col-

laborate, and achieving this agreement takes a lot of time. But many people who started the XBRL

ball rolling were like me: opinioned, driven, autocratic, ‘get it done now’ type of people. In trying to

create XBRL, each of us typically had to scramble for budgets; we didn’t have staff, and we didn’t

have any other resources,” said CPA Charles (Charlie) Hoffman, who in 1998, when it all began, was

working as a consultant helping small businesses clean up ﬁnancial messes and integrating their ac-

counting systems.

“I’d found a niche that worked for my Marine Corp-type approach,” said Hoffman. “I’d come in

to an organization with the backing of top management, authority to act, all the resources I needed,

and a mandate to solve a very speciﬁc problem quickly. This included getting people out of the way

of solving the problem if necessary. Boy was I spoiled!” But his new idea would require a different

approach; the ability to reach consensus. Voluntary consensus. It would only work if the whole world

agreed.

Hoffman had come across a potential solution for a problem shared by everyone in the ﬁnancial

industry. “It had to be the AICPA,” he said, explaining his determination to convince the Institute to

jump on the idea. Other organizations had clout and connections, he said, but only the AICPA had

the neutrality that would be needed to convince intense competitors to collaborate on a solution—a

solution that no one entity could own and that some might consider a threat.

The AICPA also had the highly spirited Wayne Harding, a VP of Great Plains Software, who was

heading the institute’s New Technology Task Force and was under pressure to produce. “We were

testing a new, ad hoc task force model,” recalled then incoming board chairman Bob Elliot. “Hard-

ing’s directive was to reach out and ﬁnd something in the area of new technology that would be really

valuable to the accounting profession and develop it ASAP. When Hoffman called, there was a place

to go with people who understood the problem, who could grasp his idea and run with it.”

The problem that Hoffman’s idea addressed was that computer applications couldn’t effectively

exchange information between each other.

4 The Story of Our New Language

Although spreadsheet software had powered the computer

revolution, by the 1980s there was a proliferation of applications

for speciﬁc business functions, such as general ledgers, payrolls,

or taxes, all of which could produce just one end result: a report.

Only a person can read a report. The data can not be shared

with other systems, only with other people. It was like having an

e-mail system that could only create a message, not send or re-

ceive it. The ﬁnancial world had become trapped in an electronic

Tower of Babel, endlessly copying and pasting information from

one system into another.

The Vision

But what if everyone would use one standard? What if you could

turn a ﬁnancial report into a database? What if a piece of busi-

ness information, once entered into a computer anywhere, never

needed to be retyped as it moved through the business supply

chain?

In February 1998, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),

the group that sets standards that help make the Internet work

by allowing the sharing of all types of information on Web pages,

had published the set of guidelines for a new document markup

language: XML (extensible markup language). XML made it

possible to attach deﬁning “tags” to each piece of information in

a document, allowing the document to be accessed and redistrib-

uted through multiple applications without manually re-entry.

At a bookstore in April of that year, Hoffman browsed

through a new publication on XML that described how the new

markup language was solving data sharing problems in the chem-

ical industry, the publishing industry, and… “I didn’t even ﬁnish

before I realized that this was the last piece of the puzzle,” said

Hoffman. “This could revolutionize the way we create and share

ﬁnancial statements!” Regardless of what system was used to

generate a report, the data could be sent, recognized, and used by

other computer systems. No more error-prone, tedious, manual

re-entry.

Early connections. Wayne Harding

(left), then a member of the AICPA

Information Technology Executive

Committee, presented CPA Charles

Hoffman the 1997 Innovative User

of Technology Award. Months later,

when Hoffman had an idea for

improved ﬁnancial statement report-

ing, he already had contacts at the

institute, including Wayne Harding,

head of New Technology Task Force,

who had recommended him for the

award.

5The Early Years

The timing of Hoffman’s discovery was perfect. Hoffman al-

ready knew Wayne Harding. As VP for Great Plains Software,

Harding had encouraged Knight, Vale, and Gregory (the com-

pany where Hoffman worked) to hire him to install accounting

systems for their clients. Hoffman led several very successful in-

stallations and also built an intranet, which in 1997 was leading

edge technology for a small CPA ﬁrm. The project earned Hoff-

man the AICPA’s 1997 Innovative User of Technology Award.

Harding was intrigued and agreed to meet Hoffman in Chi-

cago in July at a conference they were both attending. There,

Hoffman pulled out a stack of documents on XML, including

yellow highlights, notations, and more than a few exclamation

points. Asked to present these ideas at the upcoming task force

meeting in Sedona, Arizona, Hoffman left nothing to chance.

For his presentation, he created a demonstration CPAs could

relate to. He built samples for audit schedules, ﬁnancial state-

ments, and other tasks commonly performed by accountants and

hooked up a computer in his basement that could pull real time

inventory data out of the Great Plains Software accounting sys-

tem to be rendered live, online, in his presentation.

how Do we GeT The Money?

Two hours into the meeting with the task force, the only ques-

tion left from the members was how do we get the money to

do this? Team member Karen Waller suggested they put together

a product description with a funding request to build an XML

prototype. “So we need $49,000,” said Harding in August, con-

cluding his progress report to the AICPA board, which included

incoming board chairman Robert Elliott, a partner at KPMG.

From the advent, Melancon recognized the opportunity and the

challenge that technology presented to the accounting profession.

He was prepared to make the best of it. Likewise, Elliott immedi-

ately grasped that what Harding was talking about could enable

his own vision for real-time reporting and continuous assurance,

which Elliott had been writing about for at least 10 years.

The AICPA Task Force. Hearing Char-

lie Hoffman’s presentation on a new

technology that would allow separate

systems to share ﬁnancial data in real

time on the Internet, the team moved

quickly to fund more prototypes and to

make a business plan. Pictured here

are some of the task force members

at the July 1998 meeting in Sedona,

Arizona, including John Woodburn

(The Woodburn Group), Dianne Spen-

cer (Deloitte & Touche LLP), Charles

Hoffman (Knight, Vale and Gregory),

Mike Harnish (Dickinson Wright et al),

Wayne Harding (Great Plains Soft-

ware), Chris Reimel (N.J. Department

of Labor), Barbara Vigilante (AICPA),

and Karen Waller (AICPA).

6 The Story of Our New Language

The board approved the funding, and the future was back in

Hoffman’s court. But Hoffman was in trouble. Forty-nine thou-

sand wouldn’t cover it. He was working full time, and besides,

he was no techie. Hoffman was a CPA who liked using new tech-

nology, not creating it. His ﬁrst step was to convince his CEO to

let him work on company time—and to cover cost overruns. To

learn more about XML, he ﬂew to Washington D.C. to meet with

Jeffrey Ricker, CEO of a company with a promising name: XML

Solutions.

So far so good, but Hoffman still couldn’t build the proto-

types on his own, and ﬁnding anyone with XML experience was

proving difﬁcult. After a few false starts, he found Mark Jewett, a

former Microsoft employee. Jewett had worked out the problem

of rendering an XML ﬁnancial statement so that it looked good to

humans, not just to other computers. They decided that the ﬁrst

complete ﬁnancial statement to be created in XML would be for

Great Plains Software. They ﬁnished on budget.

In January 1999, Hoffman, Jewett, and Harding went to

New York City with an historic demonstration. Melancon, El-

liot, and other AICPA members watched the computer screen as

a ﬁnancial statement was rendered in a Web browser using XML-

tagged data extracted from a server in Hoffman’s basement in

Tacoma, Washington. The XML version looked identical to the

printed versions they were holding in their hands, except that the

ﬁnancial information could be automatically extracted from the

XML-based ﬁnancial data using a simple Excel macro.

It wasn’t just humans anymore who could read ﬁnancial

statements. No one, not even Hoffman, could fully grasp the im-

plications.

TiMe To QuiT anD GeT sTarTeD

Back in Tacoma, Hoffman reported on how well the meeting

went to a company that wasn’t interested, a familiar scenario for

many early enthusiasts. For Hoffman, it was time to part ways.

If he couldn’t change how his company worked, he’d change in-

stead how the entire accounting profession worked. Stepping out

7The Early Years

on his own, Hoffman became the ﬁrst person dedicated full time

to developing the new language for ﬁnancial statements. He had

no idea how, but he knew he had to continue the project. This

too, would become a common experience.

Enthused, the AICPA wanted a formal business plan for mak-

ing XML-based ﬁnancial statements. The plan had to demon-

strate market feasibility and lay out next steps. From the begin-

ning, the project was to be a market-oriented (versus academic)

endeavor. Harding started ﬁnding the people.

Louis Matherne was already on board as Director of Infor-

mation Technology at the AICPA. He had attended the January

demonstration and would now lead the business plan project.

Next came CPA Eric Cohen. “I remember the excite-

ment in Wayne’s voice,” he said about Harding’s call to recruit

him. “Eric! This is going to change accounting, and audit-

ing, and assurance, and reporting, and everything—you have

to get involved!” Eric jumped at the chance. As a computer

consultant in Rochester, New York, Cohen was working on his

own application for transferring accounting data into a ﬁnancial

statement, and he knew about XML. He understood what Hoff-

man was saying. Accountants needed to be proactive and come up

with the XML tags to deﬁne information in ﬁnancial statements—

before someone else did. But Cohen was interested in getting agree-

ment on even more tags—ones that could help move information

into and out of accounting systems, for example, between a payroll

provider and a small company or between a company and its CPA.

(Cohen’s passion for such details would result in his development

of the XBRL Global Ledger.)

Back at KPMG, Bob Elliott searched his ﬁrm for any-

one with XML experience and found Zach Cofﬁn. Cofﬁn

was neither an accountant nor an XML expert. But he was

smart, energetic, and very interested. Cofﬁn consulted for KP-

MG’s Digital Media Institute, an internal think tank. He was

already working on standards for the publishing industry and

chaired the U.S. committee on MPEG. Those digital standards

have transformed the music industry, much as XBRL is predicted

to transform business reporting.

8 The Story of Our New Language

The Vision expanDs

As the business plan took shape, the name of the project became

XFRML, which was an unfortunate choice because team mem-

bers would be hard pressed over the next two years to sell others

on a project they couldn’t pronounce. Nonetheless, it described

the team’s objective to develop an “Extensible Financial Report-

ing Markup Language” for ﬁnancial statements.

Bob Elliott was at the May 1999 meeting when the prelimi-

nary plan was presented and interrupted with a comment that, in a

heartbeat, changed the entire vision of project. “We need to think

bigger here,” he said. “We should cover more than just ﬁnancial

statements. We need to encompass all of business reporting.” It

would be many years before any work was done beyond ﬁnancial

reporting, but everyone agreed that their work needed to be done

with the bigger goal in mind.

Meanwhile, Hoffman was learning more about XML than

he ever wanted to know. He had no alternative. He had to build

10 additional prototypes that showed value in real-life business

situations, or the project would end. Hoffman camped out with

technical people “because they knew the technology, but they

didn’t know the business issues. I wanted the prototypes to do

what XML promised it could.”

a BolD leTTer

What better real life business scenario could there be than the

SEC’s electronic system for ﬁnancial reporting? The SEC had in-

vited comments on its plan to Web-enable EDGAR, the Electronic

Gathering And Data Retrieval system that public companies used

to ﬁle quarterly and annual reports, IPOs, and other federally re-

quired ﬁnancial statements. The upgrade would allow the system to

accept HTML code and PDF versions of company reports (in-

stead of using the outdated ASCII/SGML format).

Hoffman wrote to suggest EDGAR also accept XML versions

of company reports—not as ofﬁcial ﬁling, but as a way for the

SEC to test the data format that the accounting profession was

using to develop a new standard. It was incredibly bold to tell the

9The Early Years

SEC that XML was in its future given the infancy of the AICPA

project, but the letter got a response—not from the SEC, but

from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). What consortium? What

new technology? How can PwC participate? PwC’s Tom How-

land wanted to know. More importantly, Howland passed what

he learned to his boss, Walter Hamscher, who passed it along to

his boss, Mike Willis. Touchdown.

The pass off was probably the most signiﬁcant event in the

story of XBRL.

Today, in the spring of 2009, Hamscher is with the SEC’s

Ofﬁce of Interactive Disclosure, Taxonomies and Technology De-

velopment, overseeing the transition to XBRL reporting by all

U.S. public companies and mutual funds. They will be upgrading

the EDGAR system, with a $50 million infrastructure investment

for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. Mike Willis is now

chairing the International XBRL steering committee, addressing

the opportunities and challenges from the accelerating adoption

of XBRL by markets all around the world.

They didn’t waste time. Computer scientist Walter Hamscher

invited Hoffman to tour PwC’s technology center in Silicon Val-

ley. He concluded the day long visit with a request to join the

AICPA consortium. Who should he make the check out to and

for how much? Good question.

“What do I say?” Hoffman asked Matherne. “I promised to

get back to him tomorrow!” After some discussion, they decided

the fee was $10,000. Hoffman called Hamscher back, and almost

immediately after hearing PwC was sending a check, Hoffman

broke the news to Zach Cofﬁn at the competing KPMG. Includ-

ing the AICPA, the “consortium” now had 3 members.

Matherne and Hoffman based the $10,000 membership fee

on 3 criteria. The amount had to be high enough to show a com-

mitment, low enough to prevent multiple levels of internal orga-

nizational approval, and, assuming they could ﬁnd 12 members,

the $120,000 would cover start up funding.

10 The Story of Our New Language

13 MeMBers siGn on

In quick succession, the other large accounting ﬁrms were on

board, and several information technology companies were sign-

ing up, delighted at the rare opportunity for the face-to-face

collaboration. They included Great Plains Software, FRx Soft-

ware, and Microsoft. Microsoft already had a working relation-

ship with the AICPA, but when marketing representative Christy

Reichhelm got wind of the consortium, she brought her company

on board. Reichhelm was instrumental in helping people under-

stand that despite its place-holder name, XFRML wasn’t just a

“techie thing”; it was a better mousetrap.

The consortium also wanted Mark Schnitzer of FreeEDGAR,

but because his company was being acquired by EDGAR Online,

he would have to wait until negotiations were complete. The two

companies aggregated and published SEC data and were the ﬁrst

to make it available online. This was a direct connection with the

SEC, whose buy-in was considered critical.

Back in Tacoma, Hoffman was drinking a lot of coffee. His

10 prototypes were due in July. Each day at Starbucks, he’d share

his excitement with Mitch Dombrausky, a barista taking time off

from his religious studies at college. When the barista mentioned

an interest in learning programming, Hoffman roped him in to

work on the code required to render the XML prototypes. (Hoff-

man doesn’t know if Dombrausky ever got his religion degree,

but the barista did go on to work for Microsoft.)

By July, the business plan was ready to present to the AICPA.

“I went with a very simple, deliberate strategy,” said Hoffman.

“CPAs are not known for embracing change. I’ve worked with

CPAs my entire career, and I knew what I was getting into. The

AICPA was just a whole group of CPAs. So my strategy was to

take away all reasons for them to say no. The only remaining op-

tion would be ‘yes’!” Not everyone in attendance understood the

technical talk that day, said Hoffman, but they knew that board

chairman Bob Elliott was behind it and that all the big account-

ing ﬁrms had signed on. The business plan countered any last

resistance.

11The Early Years

On July 17, 1999, the AICPA board of directors agreed to

fund the project. Hoffman was moved. A single CPA from a

small town in the United States had reached out to his profes-

sional organization, and they listened. Not only did the AICPA

listen, it nurtured the vision, gave it a home, and gave the money

to keep it alive. He was moved that the rest of the world was also

listening and had come to the table to help the AICPA do what it

could not do alone.

The 13 original members (12 plus the AICPA) met the follow-

ing month to form a steering committee. “I really don’t believe

that it had to be XML,” said Eric Cohen, “but it did have to be

a community in agreement. That, to me, is the bigger story. To

go on from this point—for a group of competitors to create a

new language for the entire ﬁnancial world to use—that would

require ﬁerce agreement. It had to start with us,” said Cohen.

“We had to agree. We had to agree to agree. And we would have

to keep on agreeing to agree.”

AGREEING TO AGREE

a CulTure of Consensus

“We were 13 people sitting in the dark, and the disagreements started right away,” said Zach Cofﬁn,

recalling the ﬁrst meeting of the XFRML steering committee. Everyone agreed they needed a better

name (eventually changed to XBRL), but on the bigger questions of what are we doing and how

should we do it, the group was not in unison.

They had to act quickly. Other industries were already using XML to solve problems of sharing

data. If they didn’t come up with a solution fast, others surely would. If a few large organizations

were to offer competing, proprietary solutions, those winners would have a huge advantage and trap

everyone else in their silos. The members who had gathered had reason to be wary.

“For some reason,” said Cofﬁn, “I suggested that we don’t take a vote on anything other than

what we get for lunch or procedural issues.” Louis Matherne asserts “The decision to use consensus

instead of voting was key. It set up a future of long, agonizing debates, but it turned us into a united

force.”

As Cofﬁn explained, “If you start voting, you start making alignments and counting those in your

camp.” Getting consensus would often make the group inefﬁcient, “but it was incredibly powerful

to say to another organization or country or other industry leaders that if they joined us, they could

also stand up and veto. It set a wonderful standard of true collaboration. Wonderful. Besides, if some

member really had issue with what we were planning, then I didn’t want to go forward until we all

felt comfortable.”

The veto power, wisely given, was just as wisely never used. Matherne credits the leadership of

Mike Willis as the biggest driver behind the concept of consensus. He personiﬁed the spirit of inclu-

sion, and, as a partner in a major accounting ﬁrm, he had a deep understanding of how to get things

done. “It was always his approach” said Matherne, “that it is better to include than exclude.”

14 The Story of Our New Language

The ﬁrst ofﬁcial XFRML meeting. Thir-

teen original companies met with the

AICPA at its New York headquarters in

October 1999 to establish the XFRML

steering committee: The AICPA, Arthur

Andersen, Cohen Computer Consulting,

Deloitte & Touche, e-content company,

Ernst & Young, FreeEDGAR.com, (now

EDGAR Online), FRx Software Corpo-

ration, Great Plains, Microsoft, PwC,

KPMG, and The Woodburn Group.

whaT Does iT Mean To Be a MeMBer?

The 3 non-negotiable demands of membership created a mean-

ingful identity that united the members behind a cause: (1) mem-

bers had to pay a fee that put skin in the game, (2) they had to

actually use the technology (which encouraged application devel-

opment), and (3) they had to tell the world. Visible support for

XBRL within a member’s company, product, or service was criti-

cal. People couldn’t join just to network or make their company

look good. For example, Microsoft committed to publishing its

own ﬁnancial statements in XBRL. Membership fully committed

members to the outcome of their XBRL projects and helped the

consortium achieve the broad market acceptance that was neces-

sary for success. When the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

(FDIC) joined, they not only used XBRL for a major project, they

also agreed in advance to share the results with the public—not

something companies normally do with a competitive advantage.

xBrl eVanGelisTs

There is a sincere, heart-felt altruism that many people have no-

ticed about the XBRL community and its more evangelistic mem-

bers. As the work progressed, many members of the XBRL com-

munity saw that there would be no immediate beneﬁt to them but

instead that it could beneﬁt the world. It was during the time of

the Enron scandal and WorldCom collapse and calls for honesty

and transparency in business reporting. “All of us saw an op-

portunity to do good for the world,” said Eric Cohen. “It’s my

personal belief that this attempt to give a gift to the world is the

reason XBRL is today the global standard for business report-

ing,” said Hoffman. “Not everyone approached it that way, but

a core group of people did, and that’s what made it work.”

In light of such an exciting career challenge, who cares if

there’s no budget, no proﬁts, and no compensation or promotions

in sight? So what if you are working the equivalent of two jobs, or

that XBRL on a business card is not enhancing your career?

In large measure, the individuals engaged in XBRL were not

mainstream players. There were exceptions, of course, but these

15Agreeing To Agree

passionate heroes were willing to take risks and drive change

where few of their more traditional peers would venture. “People

wanted to be a part of it,” recalls Hoffman. “Those who under-

stood what we were doing had to jump in.” Some jumped back

out. Some stayed a while longer and then burnt out.

It was a heady time, and there were so many smart, individu-

alistic people, recalled Eric Cohen, such as Todd Boyle, “XBRL’s

greatest fan and biggest tormentor,” whose brilliant insights and

quasi-religious conspiracy theories spun heads in all directions.

He would cajole us to admit our dark desire to use XBRL to take

over the world, said Cohen. But on the other hand, XBRL could

empower individuals, and as Boyle posted on a discussion site,

“As soon as any P2P software emerges that allows the individual

to conduct business without being molested by the government

and its unholy alliance with ﬁnancial services companies and

software companies, there is quite a good potential for explosion

even more rapid and disruptive than Napster.”

“I drank so much XBRL Kool-Aid I turned color,” said Louis

Matherne. “It wasn’t just a growing membership roster; it was a

movement,” said Zach Cofﬁn. Sister movements were also tak-

ing place at the time, such as the social reporting initiative, triple

bottom line, and the global reporting initiative. “We knew we

could help.”

Some believed the group could bring about the biggest change

in ﬁnancial reporting since the adoption in the 15

century of the

double entry bookkeeping method. A colleague at PwC told Cof-

ﬁn he reminded him of the maniacal preacher played by actor

Robert Mitchum in the movie The Night is a Hunter. “I’m not

sure that was a compliment,” said Cofﬁn. It wasn’t. Their enthu-

siasm often got the XBRL community in trouble for selling the

beneﬁts the open standard would bring to the world, long before

they had something to show.

one year MilesTone: The firsT release

July 31, 2000, was set as the deadline for the release of the ﬁrst

speciﬁcation of the standard—and it still didn’t have a name.

16 The Story of Our New Language

Mike Willis, PwC, Founding Chair of

the XBRL International steering com-

mittee, pictured here with Michael

Ohata, Microsoft (currently with

KPMG), the 4th XBRL International

steering committee chair.

They needed something tangible to demonstrate success and

maintain momentum.

Despite the struggle everyday to get resources, XBRL was

being built by ordinary heroes and not the established thought

leaders or entrenched folks in established lines of business. With

over 50 members, the year-old grass-roots volunteer effort had

moved quickly and accomplished much to lay the foundation for

the explosive growth ahead:

• A new name: XBRL. In a well attended meeting, mem-

bers who were tired of trying to pronounce XFRML hap-

pily agreed on the descriptive though still unlovely name

of XBRL, which stands for eXtensible Business Reporting

Language.

• A new name for the committee: XBRL International.

As XBRL International, the group was still a part of the

AICPA, which continued to provide ﬁnancial and physi-

cal resources along with the inﬂuential public endorse-

ment of board chairman Bob Elliott. Mike Willis was

the organization’s founding chair, whose understanding

of business helped organize the group around a business

plan. A general partner at PwC, he helped attract high

level talent from the big accounting ﬁrms. This automati-

cally extended the reach of this small community into the

highest levels of the profession, including the banking in-

dustry, government, securities regulators, and other inter-

national standards associations.

• Organic growth. With members spread across the coun-

try and no budget for meetings, they set up free Yahoo!

Groups as their communication network. This had the

tremendous advantage of allowing task teams to grow

quickly and organically, organize around the needs of the

project and the talents of volunteers, and avoid the pit-

falls of organizational bureaucracy. People who wanted

to lead, and could, quickly rose to the top.

• Technical advances. XBRL broke from the traditional

use of XML, which Hoffman’s prototypes were based on.

To continue in that direction would have required every

17Agreeing To Agree

business either to create its own data points, which would

reduce comparability, or to report in the same way by

ﬁlling out a standard form that the consortium would

deﬁne. Neither of these approaches was acceptable. Busi-

ness reports expressed using XBRL had to allow their cre-

ators to express their information as they saw ﬁt, just as

it works with U.S. GAAP reporting today. This was one

of the group’s most signiﬁcant and far-reaching decisions

and would lead the way to truly interactive data: Any

piece of business information, from anywhere, at any

time, expressed in any way, in the language you need it,

converted to the way you want to see it.

• SEC contact. An informal meeting, with the SEC’s then

chief accountant Lynn Turner, initiated a relationship

with the agency that would eventually lead to its adop-

tion of XBRL.

• Effective marketing. The consortium never could have af-

forded the talents volunteered by member Christy Reich-

helm, who began a branding, marketing, and PR effort,

shaping the market impression of XBRL that continues

today.

• Contact with standard setters. Eric Cohen became the pri-

mary bridge to other national and international standards

organizations to ensure interoperability with XBRL.

• Release of ﬁrst speciﬁcations. On July 31, 2000, XBRL

International published the XBRL 1.0 speciﬁcation and a

taxonomy (a list of terms and associated computer code)

deﬁning 1,880 concepts for ﬁnancial reporting of com-

mercial and industrial companies under U.S. GAAP. The

speciﬁcations were edited by Walter Hamscher and David

vun Kannon. Editors of that ﬁrst U.S. GAAP taxonomy

were Sergio de la Fe, Elmer Huh, and Charlie Hoffman.

18 The Story of Our New Language

First public demonstration. On July 31, 2000, XBRL International proudly announced the on-time release of the ﬁrst

speciﬁcation for U.S. companies, “XBRL for Financial Statements.” Membership in the XBRL steering committee had

grown to more than 50 entities and now included several international professional organizations.

19Agreeing To Agree

“I remember the room getting quieter and quieter

as everyone realized we were in a whole new ball

game,” said Zach Cofﬁn, describing an unforget-

table moment in the fall of 2000, as he updated the

group on his progress. It had become his personal

mission to get the whole world on board, and he

was doing just that. “It was a crazy, crazy update,”

he said. “Twenty minutes into my report, I had gone

through about 15 countries, and I could see them

thinking… Here we are, this little group, sitting in

this little room, and this guy is talking about Indo-

nesia?”

More than anyone during those ﬁrst two years, Cofﬁn

had a sense of urgency. He intuitively knew the consor-

tium had to have at least one more application some-

where in the world. Australia was about to implement

an XBRL solution, and France intended to develop its

own technology.

“With no agreement on a single global platform that

let everyone communicate, we’d replicate what al-

ready exists in the world of accounting standards:

French accounting standards, Indian accounting,

U.S. GAAP—a hundred different standards and sys-

tems, unable to use each other’s information, unable

to understand the numbers in any context. That was

the problem in the ﬁrst place!”

This continues to be a major concern of the interna-

tional organization. Even with agreement on XBRL

as the global standard, the language is extensible.

If national XBRL domains choose to, they can use

XBRL to build economic or political barriers—and

extend themselves into isolation.

XBRL’s world travelers.

Zach Cofﬁn (left), shown

here with Walter Hamscher,

was on a personal mission

to make XBRL the global

standard for business

reporting before other countries started developing their

own standards and replicating the very same communi-

cation problem the consortium was trying to solve.

In a race against time, Cofﬁn made creative use of

his expense account and the international travel re-

quired by his “day job” at KPMG. “I would have a

meeting in Beijing for example, and then skedaddle

down to Shanghai to the stock exchange or to meet

with the ministry of ﬁnance on behalf of XBRL and

somehow squeeze in a few extra days on my trip.

That’s how I got a lot of stuff done. Plus, I didn’t

sleep.”

Cofﬁn circled the globe, leveraging the international

organizations of XBRL members’ ﬁrms, including

the Big Four. Between his evangelizing efforts and

the success of the consortium’s work with the IASB

and IFAC and other international standard setters,

XBRL soon became the only game in town.

Two years was enough. Cofﬁn had slept in 200 too

many airports, and his neighbor was tired of feeding

his 14 cats. By the time he left, there were 8 formal

XBRL jurisdictions. He had been to 30 countries.

About 20 were “warm,” and China was moving

forward. In 2002, at the age of 32, Cofﬁn resigned

from KPMG as Global XBRL leader, leaving be-

hind a team, a road map, and good sized budget.

“I had done what I needed to do, and personally, I

was looking to grow in some other areas.” (Cofﬁn

is currently producing a movie about Bhopal, the

industrial disaster.)

“Zach is a very unusual, very high energy person,”

said Louis Matherne. “I know. I spent a year with

him one weekend.”

Connected. Liv Watson has

spent seven years circling

the globe to nurture the in-

ternational network and to

advise companies, regula-

tors, and governments. She

has amassed the most air miles (“most of it in coach”),

the most extensive black wardrobe, and the largest

address book of anyone in the XBRL community. She is

pictured here with Eric Cohen somewhere in the world,

at yet another conference site.

Zach’s Mission

OUT OF COMMITTEE, INTO THE WORLD

The firsT inTernaTional ConferenCe

XBRL was “done.” Interest was forming outside the United States, such as in Japan and Canada, and

some ﬁnancial centers were taking note. Even so, it was obviously a U.S. organization. At the ﬁrst

international conference, in London in January, 2001, one European raised his hand to pointedly ask

what the bunch of Americans up front knew about the world’s accounting standards. Later, a spon-

taneous meeting took over the day’s agenda as members voiced their biggest concern: “extensibility.”

Just how ﬂexible was this new language for gathering and communicating ﬁnancial information?

The scope of XBRL was huge, encompass-

ing all the processes of business reporting,

from data gathering to internal and external

reports, investment and lending regulation,

and economic policy. It would touch everyone

from businesses and their trading partners

to investors and banks, auditors, securities

regulators, and more. Would XBRL be “exten-

sible” enough for the United States, let alone

the entire world?

Could XBRL be extended, for example, to work with International Financial Reporting Standards

(IFRS)? David Hardidge, a partner with Ernst & Young, needed to know. (Hardidge would become

the founder of XBRL Australia.) Another potential user, Fidelity Investments, was interested in using

XBRL. Its team, led by Steve Tolkin, had already provided signiﬁcant feedback on the speciﬁcations

to extend XBRL’s use into mutual funds.

The corporate reporting supply chain

External

Financial

Reporting

Business

Operations

Internal

Financial

Reporting

Investment,

Lending,

Regulation

Processes

Economic

Policymaking

Participants

Auditors

Trading

Partners

Investors

Financial

Publishers

and Data

Aggregators

Regulators

Software Vendors

Management

Accountants

Companies

Central

Banks

22 The Story of Our New Language

Campbell Pryde and Michelle Savage

participating in a panel session at the

11th XBRL International conference in

Boston in the spring of 2005.

Clearly, XBRL 2.0 was needed. The agonizing struggle for

consensus continued between the business and technical groups,

but they worked in a culture where people listened. The technical

people, such as Walter Hamscher, David vun Kannon, and Geoff

Shuetrim, endeavored to understand what business users wanted

to do with XBRL and tried to balance sometimes conﬂicting

requirements. People in the business domain, mostly account-

ing and ﬁnancial reporting expertise such as Charlie Hoffman,

Campbell Pryde, and Josef Macdonald, endeavored to under-

stand how the technical tool they were trying to create and use

worked or didn’t seem to work.

The QuieT Japan perioD anD xBrl 2.0

The cultural differences of the people creating XBRL were also

beginning to surface, though in each jurisdiction, a potential new

member was converted by XBRL evangelists and took a similar

leap of faith. In an academic study on knowledge management,

author Emma Gibson reported that Eiichi Watanabe, founding

member of XBRL Japan and member of the XBRL International

steering committee, “was sold in three days and single handedly

managed to engage Japanese corporations without the clout of

big brand names and only his passion to do so.”

The Japanese made valuable contributions to the next release,

XBRL 2.0. As a result of their work, the Japanese government

wrote XBRL into new regulations that allowed securities regula-

tors to use XBRL-tagged ﬁnancial information in their updated

ﬁnancial reporting system. (Along with Watanabe, the Japanese

XBRL working group included Masatomo Goto, Makoto Koi-

zumi and Atsushi Ohtake.)

Soon, additional Japanese government agencies began adopt-

ing the data format, including Financial Services Agency (Japan

FSA) and the National Tax Authority. Along with XBRL 2.0, the

XBRL Global Ledger addressed the needs of tax regulators and

larger enterprises. (The XBRL Global Ledger team was led by

Eric Cohen.)

Japan moves forward. XBRL Interna-

tional and Japan Standards Asso-

ciation (JSA) sign an agreement on

translation of XBRL for the purpose

of making it a Japanese Industrial

Standards at the JSA head ofﬁce

in Tokyo. From left to right: Hideo

Kayama, Masayuki Yamanaka, Akira

Ito, Professor Shogo Sakakura, Louis

Matherne, Eiichi Watanabe, and

Nobuyuki Sanbuichi.

23Out of Committee, Into the World

First major implementation. In the

summer of 2005, FDIC CIO Mike Bar-

tell gives an update on the agency’s

use of XBRL to improve the speed and

accuracy of call reports from more

than 8,200 banks. It was the ﬁrst major

project for XBRL.

As the U.S. community was soon to learn, Asia and emerg-

ing markets (with some notable exceptions) were more open to

change and quicker to adopt XBRL than the country of its origin.

ausTralia’s Close Call

Here’s how it happened in Australia which saved the day for

global XBRL: Project manager John Turner (now Chief Executive

of CoreFiling, a leading developer of global XBRL solutions) was

studying an architectural diagram of the new ﬁnancial report-

ing system for the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority

(APRA). The diagram had a box labeled “XML” that seemed to

Turner to relate to how data would get into the system. Curious,

Turner tried some Google searches using “XML” and “ﬁnancial

reporting.” Up popped XBRL.

He called APRA’s auditor, KPMG, for advice. Zach Cofﬁn

called back. “God bless John Turner,” said Cofﬁn. “Had I never

gone to Australia, and had John not wanted to work with the

XBRL organization, Australia would have been the ﬁrst to de-

velop a competing XML-based solution, and global XBRL may

never have happened.”

APRA decided not to reinvent the wheel. Theirs was the ﬁrst

implementation of XBRL. A lot of people were watching now

to see if it could live up to its promises. APRA, like all consor-

tium members, committed to sharing their results with the pubic.

The APRA case study opened doors around the world for XBRL

evangelists. That year, 2001, many jurisdictions were formed:

XBRL Australia, XBRL Canada, XBRL Germany, XBRL IASB,

XBRL Japan, XBRL Netherlands, XBRL UK, and XBRL US.

CoMpeTinG for The BiG prize: The fDiC proJeCT

Back in the United States, the very people who had worked so

hard to achieve consensus were now positioning themselves to

compete for the largest, most visible implementation of XBRL

to date. In June 2002, the FDIC issued a request for proposals

to create a centralized data repository where bank call report

data would be received from ﬁlers and delivered to users. XBRL

24 The Story of Our New Language

Walter Hamscher with Tim Bray at the

8th XBRL International conference in

Seattle. Tim Bray was a co-editor of

the W3C XML speciﬁcation that XBRL

is built on.

would be the data format to improve the quality, speed, and cost

of the call reports from approximately 8,200 U.S. banks.

The FDIC is part of the larger FFIEC (Federal Financial In-

stitutions Examination Council), a collection of regulators, each

with their own data collection systems. The FDIC was leading an

effort to create a single, ﬂexible data collection format that all the

regulators could use, which was exactly why XBRL was created!

The FDIC was taking a big risk, but assistant director Phil

Walenga was very familiar with the promises of XBRL. He served

on the consortium’s steering committee and led his company’s

team, which included Jon Wisnieski and Mark Montoya. Not

only was he familiar with XBRL’s promises, he also knew the in-

teroperability problems that were beginning to surface with users

of XBRL 2.0. These issues would have to be solved before any

contract could be awarded.

The XBRL teams were pushed to quickly resolve some very

sticky technical issues, but they were also pulled to protect their

own solutions, which might help win the contract. The pressure

of the FDIC deadline, and the desire for the prize, now sorely

tested the community’s professed altruism.

The big prize of a high-proﬁle FDIC project turned collabora-

tors into competitors and pressured them to release XBRL 2.1.

The editors held together with the extraordinary project manage-

ment of Hugh Wallis, the solid grounding and focus of David

vun Kannon, an extraordinary understanding of XML by Geoff

Shuetrim and Phillip Engel, plus the practical approach and

broad skill set of Walter Hamscher. Two nontechnical contribu-

tors, CPA Charlie Hoffman and CA Campbell Pryde, ensured

that the technical solution met the business market’s needs.

It helped that much of the job fell to the technical people. The

brilliance of the work they had been doing was becoming clear,

and the business domain people began to share the conﬁdence.

As they worked together more intensely than ever before, the

business people began understanding many of the trade-offs nec-

essary to reach the goal XBRL was striving to achieve—the goal

they were all trying to achieve.

25Out of Committee, Into the World

Mandates in Asia. Former SEC chair-

man Christopher Cox meets with

XBRL members from Japan, China,

Korea, Singapore, and Israel, which

were countries that adopted XBRL for

their capital markets years before the

United States mandated its use for

public company and mutual fund re-

porting. Shown here from left to right

are Li Wei, Deputy Director-General,

Information Center, China Securities

Regulatory Commission; U.S. SEC

chairman Christopher Cox; Mark Bo-

giano, President and CEO, XBRL U.S.;

and Xiaocheng “Peter” Shi, Deputy

Director, Information Center Shanghai

Stock Exchange, China.

The new release, delivered on time on December 31, 2003,

was a vast improvement over the last. Evidence of the quality of

XBRL 2.1 is that the speciﬁcation has held for the last 5 years (as

of this writing), delivering on its promise of stability and serving

the even bigger implementations that would follow.

UBMatrix (Hoffman’s company) won the XBRL portion of

the contract, working with Unisys, which built the data reposi-

tory. They had made the effort to learn about the new data stan-

dard, which helped win the contract. The FDIC system went live

in October 2005 and was, by all measures, an astounding suc-

cess. The high proﬁle project gave conﬁdence to others watching

and waiting to see if XBRL would really work. It did.

asia MoVes QuiCkly

Although there were signiﬁcant XBRL projects all across

Asia, China, in 2004, was the ﬁrst capital market to adopt XBRL

as its data standard. Stock exchanges in Japan, Singapore, and

South Korea quickly followed. China was opening its markets

to foreign investments and realized the beneﬁt of a standard that

could overcome national language barriers.

The Chinese stock exchanges were interested in XBRL for

better regulatory reporting, according to Shuo Bai, CTO of the

Shanghai Stock Exchange, “but the dramatic change in the qual-

ity, granularity, and timeliness of the data has had the effect of

changing the West’s view of the Chinese market.” During con-

ferences and meetings with XBRL experts, the Chinese teams,

like so many others, were impressed by the level of devotion and

change is hard. resistance is good.

Hoffman by now had developed an appreciation for the resistance

he once disdained: “I learned some things about change. It’s not a

bad thing that people are resistant to change. I learned that change

should be hard. Resistance is healthy. If it was too easy to change,

we would change too many things probably too quickly and make

a lot of mistakes. If it’s hard to change, you have to really want it,

and then be willing to go through a lot of pain and effort to get it

right. Change basically needs to be earned.”

26 The Story of Our New Language

Europe takes center stage. In 2004,

the focus of XBRL development turned

to the European Union, which under-

stood the value of a language that

could be understood across borders

and regardless of national accounting

rules. Pictured are Kurt Ramin and

Olivier Servais, IASC Foundation.

energy they saw. “That inﬂuenced a lot of people in China,” said

Shuo.

As XBRL was being introduced throughout Asia, national

cultures and international politics frequently came into play. “I’d

be at a little meeting about XBRL and felt like I was negotiating

international treaties, in terms of who could be at the table as

equal collaborators or why they should agree to use a nonpropri-

etary technology,” said Liv Watson. Watson had taken up where

Zach Cofﬁn left off, meeting with companies and governments

everywhere to promote the adoption of XBRL. “Not everyone

warmed to the idea of a free, open standard that no one could

own or control,” she said. “I was surprised at the amount of

time I had to spend on this concept. In a country like Dubai,

I’d be asked how can we buy XBRL, and in another country

people would ask why should we spend money on something

that’s free.”

The european era

Focus was shifting to building a taxonomy for ﬁnancial report-

ing under IFRS, and XBRL innovation was shifting to Europe.

Interest in XBRL took a huge leap when, in 2004, the European

Commission awarded a grant of US $1.2 million (€1 million)

to accelerate awareness. Their funding and endorsement helped

establish new jurisdictions across Europe and made XBRL the

default business reporting protocol for the European Union.

Million dollar boost. Seven companies in XBRL International

worked with the European Commission on a grant to accelerate

awareness. The center of XBRL soon shifted to Europe, whose

developers found new and innovative uses for the young report-

ing standard. In November 2004, approximately 500 people

came to see what the excitement was all about at the 10th XBRL

International conference in Brussels.

Concerns about XBRL’s extensibility had been addressed in

the XBRL 2.1 speciﬁcations, allowing an eye-popping array of

government-wide and cross border applications. For example,

the Dutch Water Board saw that it could incorporate XBRL

Federico Florez offering a toast to the

success of XBRL.

27Out of Committee, Into the World

XBRL team leader Jan Pasmooij,

XBRL Netherlands, and part of the EU

effort.

reporting into an e-government initiative to reduce duplication in

reporting requirements among the government, businesses, and

even private taxpayers.

On a larger scale, the innovative Bank of Spain (driven by

CIO Federico Florez and his assistant Ignacio Boixo) saw that

XBRL could be used to meet Basel II requirements with more

efﬁcient reporting and improved data quality. They led the Com-

mittee of European Banking Supervisors’ use of XBRL for liquid-

ity reporting and ﬁnancial reporting.

The vision of a global community and the ways a common

language could unite the world of business reporting was com-

ing true as the Bank of Spain pulled in other central banks from

Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and Greece. That collaboration

to extending XBRL to meet their needs spawned the innovation

known as XBRL Dimensions (aka “tables” or multidimensional

analysis features), which was then used back in the United States

to improve the U.S. GAAP taxonomies architecture. (Much credit

goes to Ignacio Hernandez-Ros who has been the primary driver

behind this innovation that is proving to be an ingenious design

for conveying multidimensional information.)

The seC ManDaTes xBrl for The worlD’s larGesT CapiTal

arkeT

“What is the SEC’s position?” That was always everyone’s ﬁrst or

second question, said Louis Matherne. While XBRL was taking

off in Europe and Asia, it appeared stalled in the United States.

Rumors were circling the globe as to why the regulator of the

world’s largest capital market was missing in action. Could the

dream of global consensus end here?

The SEC was actually very interested, but the task was enor-

mous! Could XBRL really be ﬂexible enough to bridge all the

technical, legal, and infrastructure issues built into the huge,

mature U.S. market? Unlike the more prescriptive form-based

reporting of many other countries, corporate reporting require-

ments in the United States are ﬂexible, which leads to greater

complexity. If the compliance burden was high, backlash would

The French Connection: Fredric Cha-

pus, UBMatrix France; Gilles Maguet,

XBRL France; and Bruno Tesniere,

PwC Belgium/France

28 The Story of Our New Language

Jeff Naumann leading a session at

an XBRL conference with Charlie

Hoffman.

be huge from the 17,000 public companies and 8,000 mutual

funds reporting to the SEC. The agency wanted the request for

the standard to be market driven.

The SEC followed XBRL’s development closely. In 2005,

chairman Christopher Cox made the call himself to Louis Math-

erne (in his dual role as AICPA’s director of XBRL and as chair-

man of XBRL International) to see how the SEC could help. Cox

quickly became its most visible cheerleader. But U.S. ﬁnancial re-

porting was the toughest case yet for XBRL to fulﬁll. No entity

could do it alone.

XBRL would demand yet another level of collaboration and

consensus. And here is how that happened:

• The AICPA had already initiated an update to the U.S.

GAAP taxonomies. But now those taxonomies would

need to cover every type of industry and business and

every reporting requirement. The institute hired Jeff Nau-

mann to manage the project and XBRL working groups.

To help him, Naumann brought in Brad Homer.

• The SEC then recruited Naumann to lead its internal ef-

fort. Homer was now managing the taxonomy develop-

ment with help from Matthew Slavin at E&Y, allowing

Naumann to spend his days at the SEC, educating and

helping Cox garner full support.

• All the major CPA ﬁrms continued providing consider-

able support to the effort. For example, Yossef New-

man (Deloitte), Paul Penler (E&Y), Dan Roberts (Grant

Thornton), and Mike Willis (PwC), among many others,

were leading the contributions on behalf of their ﬁrms in

the United States.

• Who was going to pay? Although the volunteer efforts and

contributions were considerable, the AICPA had funded

much of the taxonomy work and back ofﬁce support so

far, but now a business model needed to be crafted among

the AICPA, FASB, the PCAOB, and the SEC before they

could move forward.

29Out of Committee, Into the World

• The SEC announced in September 2006 that it would spend

$54 million to upgrade the EDGAR system and $5 million

more on the taxonomies to be paid to a new entity: XBRL

US. XBRL US was spun off from the AICPA, taking its part

as a separate, national jurisdiction in the global community.

• Mark Bolgiano, ﬁrst CEO of XBRL US, was to pull every-

thing together and deliver what the SEC needed. Instead

of volunteers, a paid team of contractors was hired to cre-

ate the taxonomies, which scaled development across a

hundred subject matter experts and overcame numerous

technical hurdles under pressure from the SEC deadline.

• A voluntary SEC ﬁling program was created—just as

Charles Hoffman had suggested in his bold letter nearly

eight years earlier—allowing business to test the data

standard and get feedback.

“My personal measure for success was to see a Wall Street

Journal article quoting SEC chairman Christopher Cox about

XBRL,” said Liv Watson, who, on March 22, 2007, opened the

morning paper to a nice birthday present. The world beyond the

XBRL community was taking note. The question was no longer

what is the SEC’s position, it was when will the SEC mandate

XBRL ﬁlings?

Few outside the XBRL developer community understood the

enormity of the accomplishment when XBRL US, on April 24,

2008, published the complete taxonomy for U.S. GAAP. It was

the last remaining obstacle to going live. Broken out by industry

sectors, the U.S. taxonomies currently include more than 12,400

XBRL tags and deﬁnitions for the standard accounting terms

used in U.S. GAAP. This is nearly double the size of any other

national taxonomy.

On May 14, 2008, the SEC announced its proposed rule re-

quiring public companies to ﬁle XBRL data. On June 10, 2008,

the SEC announced an additional proposed rule requiring XBRL

reporting of mutual fund risk/return summaries.

On August 19, 2008, the SEC unveiled EDGAR’s successor:

an entirely new system built from the ground up to use XBRL

30 The Story of Our New Language

data. On December 18, 2008, the SEC rules were ﬁnalized, and

companies began ﬁling XBRL reports in June of 2009, 10 years

from when the idea was born.

___________________

As of this writing, XBRL International, led by CEO Tony Frag-

nito, is a not-for-proﬁt consortium of approximately 550 compa-

nies and agencies worldwide, working together to build a com-

mon language for business reporting and to support its adoption.

“Collaboration is

needed to make it

to the finish line”

AFFILIATIONS OF KEY PLAYERS

This chronicle is written as seen through the eyes of as many of the key inﬂuencers of XBRL as we

could practically interview. While we did our best to ensure accuracy and to be inclusive, this docu-

ment may portray some individual perspectives that are not shared by all, and the perspectives of

some key contributors may have unintentionally been left out. The following is a list of just some of

the people who are key players in the XBRL journey. Please note that some afﬁliations may not be

current as of the writing of this chronicle, and in spite doing our best to cover the many leaders who

helped bring XBRL to life, we have undoubtedly missed a few names of people who deserve recog-

nition. Please excuse any oversights in light of the many contributors to XBRL over the years. The

AICPA wishes to express its sincerest gratitude to all who have worked, and who continue to work, so

diligently to inﬂuence this revolutionary improvement to the efﬁciency and transparency of reporting.

Mark Bolgiano, President and CEO of XBRL US

Ignacio Boixo, Bank of Spain

Zach Cofﬁn, formerly KPMG

Eric Cohen, PwC

Marisa Chung, formerly AICPA

Christopher Cox, former chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission

Sergio de la Fe, KPMG

Robert Elliott, KPMG, former chairman of the board of directors of AICPA

Phillip Engel, formerly KPMG

Federico Florez, Bank of Spain

34 The Story of Our New Language

Anthony Fragnito, President and CEO of XBRL International

Gianluca Garbellotto, Chairman of XBRL Global Ledger Working Group and XBRL columnist for

International Management Association’s (IMA) Strategic Finance Magazine

Masatomo Goto, Fujitsu

Walter Hamscher, formerly Standard Advantage and PwC, now Ofﬁce of Interactive Disclosure,

Taxonomies and Technology Development, SEC

Elmer Huh, formerly Morgan Stanley

David Hardidge, Ernst & Young, XBRL Australia

Wayne Harding, formerly Great Plains Software and AICPA New Technology Task Force, now

Navidec Financial Services, Inc.

Charlie Hoffman, formerly Knight, Vale, and Gregory, now UBmatrix

Brad Homer, formerly Ernst & Young and AICPA

Mark Jewett, Microsoft

Makoto Koizumi, Fujitsu, the Japanese XBRL working group, XBRL International Steering

Committee (XBRL ISC)

Josef Macdonald, Ernst & Young, XBRL ISC

Gilles Maguet, XBRL France

Louis Matherne, formerly AICPA and chair of XBRL International, now Director—XBRL Services,

Clarity Systems

Barry Melancon, President and CEO of AICPA

Mark Montoya, FDIC

Jeff Naumann, formerly Deloitte and AICPA, now Ofﬁce of Interactive Disclosure, SEC

Yossef Newman, Deloitte

Michael Ohata, formerly Microsoft, now KPMG, XBRL ISC

Atsushi Ohtake, Hitachi and the Japanese XBRL working group

Jan Pasmooij, Royal NIVRA, XBRL Netherlands

Paul Penler, Ernst & Young

35Afﬁliations of Key Players

Geoffrey Pickard, Editor and Communications Contributor, formerly AICPA

Campbell Pryde, formerly KPMG and Morgan Stanley, now XBRL U.S. Chief Standards Ofﬁcer

Kurt Ramin, IASC Foundation

Christy Reichhelm, Microsoft

Jeffrey Ricker, CEO XML Solutions

Dan Roberts, formerly Grant Thorton, now RAAS Consulting

Michelle Savage, formerly PR Newswire, now XBRL U.S. VP Communications

Mark Schnitzer, formerly FreeEDGAR (EDGAR Online), now MSN Money (Microsoft)

Olivier Servais, IASC Foundation

Geoff Shuetrim, KPMG

Matthew Slavin, Ernst & Young

Bruno Tesniere, PwC

Arleen Thomas, AICPA, Treasurer of XBRL ISC

John Turner, Chief Executive of CoreFiling, XBRL ISC

David vun Kannon, formerly KPMG, and PwC, now Deloitte

Phil Walenga, FDIC

Karen Waller, formerly AICPA

Hugh Wallis, formerly Hyperion Solutions, now Director of Standards Development, XBRL

International

Eiichi Watanabe, Tokyo Shoko Research, XBRL Japan

Liv Watson, formerly EDGAR Online Inc., now Board of Director IRIS Business Services (India)

Private Limited, XBRL ISC

Mike Willis, PwC, Founding Chairman of XBRL International, Chairman of XBRL ISC

Jon Wisnieski, FDIC

John Woodburn, President of the Woodburn Group