News Releases

KU Business conference focuses on revolutionary financial reporting technology

With backing from the SEC and 450 major companies, XBRL is the future of financial reporting.

Friday, May 4, 2007

LAWRENCE — Leading academics and practitioners will soon discuss the state of one of the hottest topics in the financial world, one that will revolutionize the way business information is captured and assessed. The topic is Extensible Business Reporting Language - or XBRL, for short - and it will be discussed at the 2007 International Conference on XBRL: Taxonomies and Assurance, sponsored by the University of Kansas School of Business' Ernst & Young Center for Auditing Research and Advanced Technology (E&Y CARAT).

The conference will be held Friday, May 11 and Saturday, May 12 at the SpringHill Suites hotel in Lawrence and will bring academics and practitioners together to discuss the developments and challenges facing XBRL.

"A conference like this provides a forum to not only share ideas, but also to provide an opportunity to hear contrarian views on these ideas," said Rajendra Srivastava, director of E&Y CARAT.

The idea behind XBRL is simple. Rather than treating financial data in business communications (such as quarterly statements or annual reports) as blocks of text, XBRL assigns an identifying tag to each item of data. Though seemingly insignificant, this is a revolutionary change that allows for automated processing of business information and provides substantial cost savings throughout the industry. Instead of manually re-entering data for various reports, with XBRL, computers will process the data tags and generate automated reports, greatly reducing the cost, inefficiency and chance for error.

Although public companies have not been required to code business communications in XBRL format, the Securities and Exchange Commission, along with more than 450 major companies and non-profit organizations, are pushing to implement such a mandate.

The 2007 International Conference on XBRL: Taxonomies and Assurance is one forum to help ease the transition to the XBRL format by exposing academics and practitioners to the research, teaching and business opportunities related to XBRL.

"The most important contribution of this conference will be to bring both academic and practitioners face-to-face," Srivastava said. "The will critically evaluate ideas and research findings and suggest improvements."

Co-sponsors of the conference include the KU School of Business, the KU Center for International Business and Education Research, and Ernst & Young LLP.

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