Proceedings

Nevertheless, we have to mention that several other authors mention the subject of
auditing XBRL data: Debreceny, who is currently developing a project financed by
IAAER, called “The implications of XBRL for the Financial Statement Audit”,
Flowerday, Bluntell, von Solms, Woodroof, Searcy, Onion, Rezaee and so on.
One aspect that is related to XBRL is the disclosure improvements. Yoon et al. (2010)
analyzed if XBRL reduces the information asymmetry in the case of Korean stock
markets. As we previously mentioned, the majority of the accounting and finance
researchers consider that when the level of financial disclosure increases, the
information asymmetry decreases. However, the authors conclude that XBRL may
lead to the reduction of information asymmetry from the point of view of the
investors. They prove that the information asymmetry reduction is stronger for the
larger companies than for the medium and small sized companies. Yet, for their result
to stand up it would be necessary to analyze a longer sampling window for the
selected companies, for at least two years
One of the studied articles refers to corporate governance (Premuroso and
Bhattacharya, 2008), even if it uses a small sample of companies, sows that corporate
governance is associated with a firm’s decision to be an early filer in XBRL format.
Another study that analyses the XBRL influence on corporate governance is the one
of Alles and Piechocki (2010). They discuss about the decision making process and
state that XBRL has the potential of significantly improving the governance process,
but the full usage of this advantages depend on how the users put it in use. They need
to understand that XBRL is not just a distributor mechanism, but it can also do data
modeling and be linked to analytical software. They emphasize that other programs
can also do that, but it would take a lot of time to do it and it will also imply a higher
cost, which should never be ignored in a business environment.
Bonson et al. (2009) discuss about IFRS adoption at European level in 2005 and the
IFRS decision to use XBRL in order to create a global set of standards. They draw the
conclusion that the idea to use XBRL as a common ground for international
companies is very usefully, but they also stipulate that IFRS-GL taxonomy has some
deficiencies that must be corrected if IASB wants to reach his goal. They are the only
authors that analyze this subject of research from all the analyzed articles.
Nevertheless, in the practitioners’ area, the subjects of the articles are as interesting as
in the economic one. Herein, they were going from XBRL and XML descriptions,
their advantages in comparison with other electronic languages, to data extraction
programming, such as structured and unstructured information from financial
reporting disclosed on the stock exchanges websites. Another issue that has to be
mention is databases development for different types of financial information.
So, as a general conclusion that can be drawn from these articles, XBRL is seen as the
best communication language that can assure a unique accounting standard all over
the world. But the use of XBRL draws over himself the need for a reliable and
accurate audit tool that can assure the interested parties for its precise information.
We can conclude that the XBRL topics cover subject as corporate governance
(Premuroso and Bhattacharya, 2008; Alles and Piechocki, 2010), audit (Srivastava
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