This morning, the SEC voted (by a vote of four to one) to adopt
rules mandating the use of Inline XBRL (eXtensible Business
Reporting Language) for the submission of financial statement
information for operating companies. The rulemaking is part of the
SEC's disclosure modernization initiative. For the most part,
the Commissioners showed a lot more enthusiasm for this proposal
than for the changes to the definition of "smaller reporting
company" also adopted earlier today. (See
this PubCo post.)
Currently, companies are required to provide the financial
statements and schedules accompanying their Exchange Act reports
and Securities Act registration statements in
"structured," i.e., machine-readable, format
using XBRL, but they provide this XBRL data as an exhibit to their
filings and are required to keep it posted on their websites for at
least 12 months. Inline XBRL allows data tagging to be embedded
directly in the text of an HTML document, and to include the
