Greater Accountability, Less Red Tape: The Australian Standard Business Reporting Experience

In the 1990s, the catalyst for public sector reform stemmed from government administrative efficiency and businesslike structures. This locked in the first wave of e-government to projects that looked at citizens as customers with a focus on service delivery – on the terms and at a time that suited the customer. Overt projects to strengthen the democratic process via interactive and accountable data were often considered, but lacked a mature agreed and open standard. In the absence of broadly accepted community-based standards, government agencies developed and implemented ABSTRACT Australian governments are early adopters of many electronic record-keeping and reporting systems, and the Australian Standard Business Reporting (SBR) Program evolves this further. This paper examines the evolution from government-centric technologies and standards to collaborative, open, and community standards-based systems. It describes the SBR Program as a case study in the development of seamless business-to-government reporting, which delivers significant reductions in reporting costs for business. The flexibility and universality of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an important element in the SBR approach. The benefits to business and government reveal immediate and practical benefits that expand with the growing number of users of these standards and technologies. The open, collaborative processes that have been driven by the SBR Program are consistent with the current directions of e-government in various countries. Technology in government is interactive and viewed in terms of a complex adaptive system, which needs to grow, respond, and interact with systems used by businesses in the Australian and international communities. The use of XBRL in the SBR Program increases the integrity of data that is provided to multiple parties, eliminating the need to transform financial data in a business's system to the various semantic differences currently imposed.