The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission is crediting the incorporation of interactive data into SEC filings for the discovery of “a pandemic of crooked accounting” linked to stock option backdating.
At the Practicing Law Institute’s annual “SEC Speaks” event on Feb. 9, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said XBRL, the Internet programming language newly adopted by the agency, is helping his staff root out fraud by tagging financial data so computers can track it and sift through it quickly.
