The Center’s Remarks on Landmark Legislation

Today, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) and a bipartisan group of cosponsors are holding a press conference to introduce the Financial Transparency Act of 2015. This landmark legislation would bring a new level of consistency and transparency to federal financial data of many kinds. Specifically, the proposed Act:

  1.  Directs all nine major U.S. financial regulatory agencies to adopt consistent data standards for all of the information they collect from industry, under the securities, commodities, and banking laws.
  2. Requires agencies to make their public data sets available as “open data” – electronically searchable, downloadable in bulk, and without license restrictions.
  3.  Includes a specific, short-term mandate for the Securities and Exchange Commission to address the shortcomings of its current XBRL reporting regime by switching to the inline XBRL format.
  4. Includes a specific mandate for the adoption of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) across all financial regulatory reporting regimes.

The Center’s President and Founder, Joel Gurin, was invited to give some remarks about the importance of this legislation. You can find his statement here. We welcome this new initiative and its potential to improve and enhance open data in a critical area.