“Charlie” is a certified public accountant and a former auditor. He is a product manager and lead architect of the financial reporting rules engine and financial model validation engine products for Auditchain Labs AG.
Charlie is widely considered the “Godfather of xBRL” (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Charlie received the AICPA’s 2006 Special Recognition Award at the Institute’s National Conference on Current SEC and PCAOB Developments in Washington, D.C. The award recognized Charlie’s contributions to the development of XBRL, a global standard for the communication of business information.
Charlie conceived the idea of using XML to structure financial statements and with developing the initial XBRL prototype. He was formerly the director of innovative solutions at UBmatrix, a software company based in Kirkland, Wash. He has since consulted for and architected digital financial reporting systems for a significant number of the digital financial reporting software vendors in the world.
Charlie, a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), brought the idea of what was to become XBRL to the AICPA. Charlie is author of the books XBRL for Dummies, XBRL Essentials (a non-technical guide to XBRL), and Financial Reporting Using XBRL: IFRS and US GAAP Edition (a comprehensive guide to using XBRL in financial reporting). He was co-editor of the first XBRL taxonomy. He played a major role in creating the taxonomy for financial reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). He participated on the project to create the US GAAP Taxonomy and the US GAAP Taxonomy Architecture. He was a member of both the XBRL Specification and Domain Working Groups as XBRL 2.1 was being created. Charlie is co-author of the “Financial Reporting Taxonomies Architecture” (FRTA) 1.0 specification, the “Financial Reporting Instance Standards” and a significant contributor to the XBRL 2.1 specification.
Prior to his involvement with XBRL, Charlie served as an auditor for what was then Price Waterhouse, as financial officer for a number of companies, and as an accounting software implementation consultant. In 1997, Charlie was the recipient of the AICPA Innovative User of Technology award. He was named by Accounting Technology as one of the one hundred most influential people in the accounting profession.
Charlie is a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) with both a BA in Business Administration with a concentration in accounting and an MBA with a focus on management information systems and world class manufacturing techniques. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from PLU in 2007.