I try not to get too excited about G3 XBRL : I think I fail quite alot!

So far as I’m aware GRI have only announced that one company has started producing an XBRL report using G3 tags, and that’s Banca Monte Paschi dei Siena (Italy).

I doesn’t surprise me that no-one else has taken that step as the world seems to have been waiting (as happens all too often) on the US SEC to formally mandate XBRL.

Now that that’s happened the easiest thing to do would be to cross reference the list of G3 reporting companies (http://www.globalreporting.org/GRIReports/GRIReportsList/) with those which will have to produce XBRL reports in 2009 (assets over $5bn), 2010 (US GAAP reporters) 2011 (IFRP reporters).

It’s this which I’m hoping will start to provide the independent context which, as Mallen suggests, is badly needed.

This huge flood of data will not in and of itself provide that context. It should, however, help to bolster the fledgling community of sustainability commentators and allow them to frame the data they’re analysing in a sector- and country-wide manner.

IMHO, obviously. Am I being too rose-tinted about this? And while writing this I suddenly wondered whether the XBRL introduction may be put on hold as the recession bites deeper and deeper. What do you think?

Chris.

The challenge with sustainability reporting is that the data is pretty meaningless without context. When companies produce their financial reports, they are read by expert commentators who know how to read a balance sheet, know the state of the market in that sector, are aware of the track record of the company’s leadership, and use all that to interpret the figures and tell the story of what they mean. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong.

But these reports do not have that breed of expert commentators. When was the last time a CSR report generated a news story about what it said about where the company is (as opposed to a review of how good a report it was technically)? As a result, the companies end up trying to provide the context themselves by commentary – and this is by various terms dull, uninformative PR speak. But they do it because without the context, you can’t understand the figures.

Best wishes – Mallen