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Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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What began in a Tacoma basement 10 years ago became the rule nationwide today as the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to mandate a new system of financial reporting for all publicly traded U.S. companies.
Called XBRL, the system regulates the manner by which companies report their numbers. Within the next three years, all companies will be required to use the system, thus giving investors, regulators and others interested in numbers a clear picture of results. From now on, it’s going to be apples and apples, oranges and oranges. No longer will one company’s “net profits” be called by what another company calls “net gross returns.”
It’s truly a revolution, and it was invented by Charlie Hoffman, who was, a decade ago, working for a small Tacoma accounting firm.
I spoke with Hoffman this morning after the SEC decision.
“We started this 10 years ago,” he said. “It was January 15, 1999 when we made our first presentation. There is no way anybody would have convinced me that the SEC would have been doing a mandate in 10 years. It was inconceivable. We thought 25 years. It’s been almost like the stars are just lining up perfectly at every step along the way. You get the right people to join the process. You get a guy like (SEC) Chairman Cox getting behind it, and the vision he has. You get these financial crises - they didn’t hurt the ability of this to be noticed.”
Hoffman said he recently heard XBRL compared to the invention of man-powered flight. The first flight lasted 12 seconds, and now a person can fly from any point on earth to any other point on earth without landing. Hoffman said XBRL is now “at about 45 seconds. That’s how much farther it will go. It’s still in its infancy. Companies are going to start reporting, and that’s going to drive fundamental changes to financial reporting.”
The SEC has yet to release full details of today’s meeting, but Hoffman, who listened to the meeting on a conference call, said all public companies will be required, within three years, to report using XBRL. Five hundred large companies will be required to use the system by next year, then the next 1,500 smaller companies, and then the final list of all publicly traded companies.
As I’ve reported before, the system is already in wide use across the world, with several countries mandating XBRL for private as well as public entities.
And how did Hoffman fell about today’s announcement?
“It was good,” he said.
