Encouraging Employee Ownership Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Chairman, if you are a company that is going public, if you are a company that wants to sell shares to retail investors, you are not a small business. You are a big business. You are in the big leagues.

Along with the privileges comes some responsibility. If you are too small to report your data, then you are too small to be on the NASDAQ. If you can't run with the big dogs, you should stay on the porch.

True, they could choose to report in searchable, structured data, but that would result in a fractured system. Some report by searchable data, some by PDFs.

I want the people who review corporate financial disclosure documents to have the data that they need. They need to find corporate financial data faster, in more detail, and at lower cost. That is where eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, comes in. XBRL is operating now.

When the exemption was brought before the previous Congress, two witnesses testified to costs of $50,000 or more to file in XBRL. But these two companies appear to be outliers.

The American Institute for Certified Public Accountants found that smaller firms pay, on average, $10,000 a year. Meanwhile, the group of companies that would be exempt under this bill paid more than $1 million in legal and financial banking fees in 2013 just to raise capital from investors. So the cost of XBRL is miniscule compared to the other costs of being a public company.

This amendment is meritorious, and I ask for its support.

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Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

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