XBRL project rewarded with national prize for use of open standards.

Rotterdam - November 5, 2004

The national award for 'Most Open Government Body in The Netherlands' has been adjudged to the Association of Water Boards for their ground breaking project for implementing digital reporting with XBRL. The award was presented by the Minister of Governmental Innovation Thom de Graaf during the conference 'Openness in practice' organized by the Ministry of the Interior for an audience of 500 attendees.

The prize is established to reward the government body that is exceptionally innovative in using open standards as an integral part of a strategy to improve electronic service provisioning and efficiency. The jury specifically praised the fact that the Association coordinated the efforts of 16 water boards to establish the world's first complete implementation of the standard for digital reporting. The collaborative approach is seen as an excellent example of how open standards can be made to be applied for the general benefit.

The managing director of the Association of Water Boards, Rein van der Kluit, accepted the award not only as an acknowledgement of the success of recent projects, but also as a stimulus for developing additional innovative projects. Van der Kluit: "For the water boards transparency is not a fashion statement; it has been a standing policy for many years". In his speech, he elaborated on the history of the project. He praised the 16 water boards that were prepared some 18 months ago to invest in XBRL while the commercial sector was playing a waiting game. "This pro-active stance is paying dividend: the water boards now have an leading edge in digital reporting. Also through the efforts of Semansys, Deloitte and Statistics Netherlands". The use of XBRL fits in a long tradition of innovation and transparency. Since 15 years the water boards support a benchmarking program, the results of which are published every year.

XBRL is being used by the water boards to perform so called quarterly EMU reporting to Statistics Netherlands (CBS) for the benefit of amongst others the European Central Bank and the European Committee. The implementation project has been performed by Semansys and Deloitte, with contributions of LogicaCMG and vendors of financial systems including IBS, Decade and CODA.