Last month, I did a blog entry looking at how accountants were not ready for Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) which is supposed to make it easier for investors to analyze financial data. It seems they're not on their own.

According to a new survey from Compliance Week, reported here, most companies are clueless when it comes to XBRL. That's despite plans to have it running for all companies by 2011.

The findings are alarming. The survey found that only 44 per cent had started doing their homework on it and 15 per cent didn't even know about it. And about 80 per cent said they had no XBRL expert on staff.

All of which suggests that XBRL experts will be cleaning up big time soon and cashing in. The other question is whether the implementation of XBRL will be another compliance headache for companies, kind of a Sarbanes-Oxley revisisted.

Compliance Week editor Matt Kelly says XBRL has two problems.

"First, companies don't know exactly where they should put this: Is it a project for the IT department? For the accounting department? Should companies form some sort of cross-disciplinary committee to manage this, and if so, who sits on the committee? And where should XBRL 'start' anyway- should a piece of data be tagged the moment it's recorded on the books, or at the end when the financial statements are being prepared? No best practices have emerged to answer those questions; until they do, many companies will just wait on the sidelines rather than fumble along trying to see what might work for them.

"Second, the regulators themselves don't entirely know what to do with XBRL either. How will this be enforced? What happens when an auditor sees glaring mistakes in tagging, but the rule (as proposed right now, at least) says auditor attestation of XBRL tagging isn't necessary? What if some overseas regulator has very different ideas about XBRL and how it should work? Ideally those questions will be resolved as the Securities and Exchange Commission develops and approves a final rule. Practically, that's not likely to happen."

Still, he doesn't see it as a remake of the problems that companies endured with Sarbanes-Oxley.

"SOX really did complicate financial reporting all along the chain of every major business process. Companies will be able to wrestle with XBRL at the end of major business processes, once they have the final numbers they want to include in financial reports. That may not be the most efficient approach, or may ignore operational improvements you could reap by exploiting XBRL earlier along the line- but a company could do it that way, and satisfy whatever mandate the SEC will ultimately impose."

In other words, still a headache but not as bad. It just might feel that way at the time.