XBRL & Public Sector Financial Reporting

XBRL, short of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is under consideration in public sector circles. The US public sector needs to look at the potential solutions that could be enabled with interactive data. With that thought in mind, AGA has sponsored research that begins to answer questions such as: 1. How does XBRL actually work? 2. What does an implementation actually entail? 3. What are the true costs and benefits? Specifically, this research is an opportunity to answer some of these questions and understand what efforts are needed to create a taxonomy for external reports used at the state level. The specific project was to explore what it would take to tag the data in two financial statements (Statement of Net Assets and Statement of Activities) for Fiscal Year 2006 contained in the Oregon Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. While XBRL is conceptually easy to grasp, this project clearly demonstrated that team balance was very important.