The House approved S. 303 by voice vote on Monday, Dec. 14. The bill text and debate are immediately below; the debate starts on page H14837. An easier-to-read version of S. 303 is also below. The most important part of the bill, about data standard requirements, is in xml format here.
Back on June 17, I blogged about the Government Information Transparency Act. The goal of government information transparency took a step closer to reality today when the co-sponsors of the bill, Reps. Edolphus Towns and Darrell Issa, added their bill’s provisions to a Senate bill to improve the federal grant system. The gist of the legislation is that when it is implemented, taxpayers will get protection via transparency and rules-based reporting in a way that’s similar to how investors now get better information from public companies via a combination of U.S. GAAP and XBRL. The good news is that government grant accounting is a heck of a lot less complicated than U.S. GAAP, so that protection should be faster to arrive, much less expensive to implement, and even more reliable.
Here’s video of this landmark meeting to advance government transparency:
Economic Transparency
Also today, the SEC posted a new more detailed comment on a pending rulemaking about how asset-backed securities are disclosed. It’s 13 pages of plain English. (See background, including excerpt from a speech by SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro.) Of the millions of words written about the financial crisis, these pages include just about every word you need to know:
Edgar Online re ABS: Modernize Disclosure, Cut Costs, Achieve Transparency, Restart Securitization
Even better, unlike most of those other millions of words, these words include an explanation of how to reconcile the interests of Wall Street in profits with the interests of all Americans in healthy, working, fair, transparent capital markets. Let’s hope the words spoken on Capitol Hill today and the words posted by the SEC today all matter — soon.
Until we break the Alliance of Convenience between the Congress, the Fed and the large, TBTF (too big to fail) banks and force our public officials to embrace core American values regarding transparency, insolvency and accountability, we will not in my view find a way out of the crisis.
It’s such a smart piece that I couldn’t decide what to quote, so I just took the most actionable sentence from his last paragraph. Read the entire article. Contemplate it. Pay your $1K to hear from the friendly faces here. And if you have ideas to break the alliance, comment away.
Dealbook on the New York Times for the past several days has published a series of articles on the financial crisis and the way forward. It’s a modern media approach to exploring and perhaps developing economic policy.
Say what you will about Web 2.0 and its effect on traditional media. If the Gray Lady can accelerate progress toward better functioning markets by building on its historic place as “the newspaper of record” (should it be “the news source of record” in the 21st century?), more power to it. By opening its content to a wider variety of voices, it might even mitigate the problem it created for itself over the past several decades of being criticized for bias.
[T]here seems to be a big choice here about how assertive the Federal government; the government in general, but we’re talking here about the Federal government; should be in setting the rules of the road for information exchange. Continue reading ‘Health Information Technology Standards’
