[OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting

Thu Sep 5 16:32:56 UTC 2013

Friedrich

Thanks for your thoughtful comments and for sharing the link to the online guide.

In the US, the fastest way to get to machine readable fiscal reporting is through the regulatory community’s control over the capital markets.  The SEC’s mandate to use XBRL in 2004 goes a long way toward explaining the standard’s penetration in recent years.

Since XBRL is already in the regulatory toolbox, it will be much easier to obtain its extension to another market (from corporate bonds to municipal bonds) than it would to advocate another standard.

I admit that this is an approach that works best in the US, because it has a very large amount of sub-sovereign debt that lacks central government guarantees. Because investors in state and local government securities are both numerous and now known to be taking risk, I can make a regulatory case that works well in the US and Canada – but not in too many other countries.

I agree with your concerns about the bureaucratic problems with XBRL and its vulnerability to corporate control.  In the US, the Financial Accounting Standards Board now owns the US GAAP taxonomy – so the committee problems are reduced.  The FASB has a sister organization called the Government Accounting Standards Board – which would be the likely candidate to own a muni XBRL taxonomy.

I don’t think control by IBM and SAP is a foregone conclusion.  If this proposal were to succeed, small vendors and the open source community could develop tools that would output and read XBRL files.  Since XBRL is just XML, there is really no technical barrier stopping us from supporting it.

Regards,

Marc

From: openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Friedrich Lindenberg
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 8:58 AM
To: OpenSpending Discussion List
Subject: Re: [OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting

Hey Marc, 

this is very interesting to see XBRL being picked up, but I have to say that I'm critical of its use for non balance-sheet data [1]. XBRL is basically a massive framework in which any type of data could be expressed (it seems very committee-run), but the benefits really aren't clear to me.

You can have well-documented CSV or JSON, too - and for those formats there is tooling which is useable by journalists and other end-users who do not have the means to start a 3 year XBRL implementation effort. In the end, releasing government data as XBRL could mean that only solutions from large companies like IBM or SAP would be able to invest the effort necessary to interpret the data.

Of course it would be nice to have a standard, but this one is so large and ambiguous, I can't see it being useful in a technical sense. 

Cheers, 

- Friedrich 

[1] http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter4-2.html 

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Marc Joffe <marc at publicsectorcredit.org <mailto:marc at publicsectorcredit.org> > wrote:

Concha

Thanks for these questions. 

Like PDFs, XBRL files can either be published or kept confidential.  The use of XBRL by itself is not a guarantee of transparency.  However, a publicly available machine readable file is better than a publicly available PDF, since it is easier to process.  In the world of machine readable files, I see XBRL as better than CSV because XBRL tags allow for more complete self-documentation of the data, especially if it the data is complex.

I don’t know how many Spanish cities actually file in XBRL format.  I thought the fact that they had a fairly well developed site (at http://www.e-local.es/index.html ) indicated a substantial investment and perhaps substantial compliance.  On the other hand, I am not seeing recent updates.

I see some Spanish local government statistics here:  http://www.minhap.gob.es/EN-GB/ESTADISTICA%20E%20INFORMES/Paginas/estadisticaseinformes.aspx.  Have you see this before?

Regards,

Marc

From: openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org>  [mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org> ] On Behalf Of Conchita Catalan
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 3:38 PM
To: openspending at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending at lists.okfn.org> 

Subject: [OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting

Hello Marc, 

Thank you for sending the article. It says 

"In Spain, the  <http://www.e-local.es/index.html> local government ministry encourages more than  <http://hitachidatainteractive.com/2011/02/09/xbrl-developments-in-spain-2011/> 16,000 municipalities and agencies to submit required budget reports in XBRL format. "

>From a journalist's point of view, I've been trying to find more info about this and xbrl format seems to be successfully used by private companies. I have to add that that info is not public (no Freedom of Information Law in Spain yet), although you can request it at a Registry and obtain it for an expensive fee .  

But is there any data or evidence that local governments are using it to submit their reports, or have they just been encouraged?  Do you know whether using this format in other countries implies that reports will be accessible to the general public? Can you help me find this info?

Thanks a lot, 

Concha Catalan 

-- 
Visita mi blog: http://barcelonalittleshell.blogspot.com.es/

Visita opengov.cat <http://opengov.cat> 

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 08:50:33 -0700
From: "Marc Joffe" <marc at publicsectorcredit.org <mailto:marc at publicsectorcredit.org> >
Subject: [OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting
To: "'OpenSpending Discussion List'" <openspending at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending at lists.okfn.org> >
Message-ID: <016c01cea986$7d906550$78b12ff0$@publicsectorcredit.org <http://publicsectorcredit.org> >
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

A financial industry opinion site carries my case for using XBRL (eXtensible
Business Reporting Language) in the US municipal bond market. European
readers may be interested in the example of Spain using XBRL for its local
government financial reporting.

http://tabbforum.com/opinions/the-case-for-muni-xbrl-bringing-municipal-fina <http://tabbforum.com/opinions/the-case-for-muni-xbrl-bringing-municipal-financial-disclosure-into-the-21st-century> 
ncial-disclosure-into-the-21st-century

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending/attachments/20130904/79d68148/attachment.htm>

------------------------------

_______________________________________________
openspending mailing list
openspending at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending at lists.okfn.org> 
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending
Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/optionss/openspending

End of openspending Digest, Vol 45, Issue 6
*******************************************

_______________________________________________
openspending mailing list
openspending at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending at lists.okfn.org> 
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending
Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/openspending

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending/attachments/20130905/3bf1015a/attachment.html>