01 September 2011
The IFRS Foundation, the oversight body of the International Accounting Standards Boards (IASB), today completed the first part of its project to address requests by regulators and preparers for extensions to the full International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) XBRL Taxonomy.
The IFRS XBRL Taxonomy is used to help those filing IFRS financial statements electronically to 'tag' the information with identification tags (called 'concepts' in an XBRL taxonomy). Currently, the IFRS taxaonomy includes all core concepts included in IFRSs as issued by the IASB.
However, preparers often need to provide more detailed financial information than is reflected by the core IFRS concepts. To ensure that those creating and using electronic filings do not need to create their own extensions to the IFRS taxonomy, the IFRS Foundation has created an 'extension taxonomy' by analysing and drawing from common practice. For instance, although IFRSs require the disclosure of an analysis of expenses, the IFRSs do not include a prescriptive listing of all the possible categories of expenses. The common-practice taxonomy includes concepts for the most commnonly used types of expenses, such as 'sales and marketing'.
The interim taxonomy released today completes the first part of a project to address this issue, by providing about 350 extensions for the most common concepts used in the financial statements. Work is continuing on extensions to the detailed tagging of the footnotes to the financial statements. The IFRS XBRL team expect to publish proposals in October 2011.
The common-practice concepts are in line with IFRS requirements and will help to alleviate the burden on preparers and to increase the comparability between financial statements in accordance with IFRSs that are electronically submitted.