U.S. regulators will decide next year if companies should be required to file financial reports in a machine-readable computer code to make data more easily comparable, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said on Tuesday. Cox has been encouraging companies to report financial data using extensible business reporting language tags that allow investors to more easily analyze the information in spreadsheet programs.

But many companies have hesitated amid concerns about XBRL's maturity and implementation costs.

Cox said the U.S. XBRL group has completed all its work on developing data tags for U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which represented "the removal of the last major obstacle that stood behind the world and interactive data."

At a news conference, Mark Bolgiano, president of XBRL US Inc, handed Cox a tiny data card with the code for thousands of tags for volumes of U.S. accounting classifications.

While the data tags are being reviewed by major accounting firms and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, Cox said the SEC and XBRL groups would work on promoting the format.