XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

Neither the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) nor the European Single Market Authority (ESMA) implementations of XBRL-based financial reporting information collection schemes works the way that they really need to work. In fact, in 2008 or 2009 when the SEC's XBRL-based system went live, I told Mike Willis  who worked at PWC at the time and now works for the SEC that it was not going to work.  I did not understand precisely why at the time.  I also knew that the ESMA implementation was not going to work because it was essentially a duplication of what the SEC did but using a different XBRL taxonomy (IFRS instead of US GAAP) and an attempt to implement what they called "anchoring" which they seemed to figure would solve all the problems the SEC was encountering. I spent the next 15 years figuring out precisely why the SEC's implementation was not working effectively and more importantly how to fix what was not working. So, the first issue related to both th...