In the middle of toasting itself for a decade of hard work, the XBRL community learned that U.S. Senators inexplicably cut a data transparency amendment out of the financial overhaul bill. What happened? Who doesn’t want more transparency in government’s spending?
Perhaps it was a classic problem of the House versus the Senate, or perhaps it was the result of some overreaching by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has earned the unofficial title of Obama’s Annoyer-in-Chief. The amendment he originally proposed for the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform bill would have required regulators to use a standard electronic format, such as Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), but only for a few types of transactions, collecting and publishing business information from the financial industry.
But Issa withdrew his original proposal to work on an expanded version with the staff of the House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass. The new proposal would have affected almost every financial data collection in the regulatory overhaul bill.
NextGov.com reports that not even Issa knows what killed the amendment, but when the bill took final shape in the Senate, all mention of data transparency had disappeared. It had mysteriously vanished in the final hours of congressional negotiation. Says Issa, “… when I’ve asked the Senate, ‘What happened? How did it just die?’ I can’t even find somebody who says, ‘I didn’t like it, there was something wrong with it.’
Frank has committed to sending the proposal to the House floor under expedited voting procedures and to try again. “That’s as best we can do,” he said.
As Mark Bolgiano, President and CEO of the XBRL US organization pointed out in his premature congratulations to community members, “XBRL adoption is, without a doubt, an endurance sport…” He got that right.
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