IFRS Foundation and SEC update XBRL taxonomy for 2018

By Admin

March 17, 2018

The International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation has released a new IFRS Taxonomy for 2018, containing a number of updates since last year, while the Securities and Exchange Commission also updated its taxonomy.

The IFRS Taxonomy contains the latest standards from the International Accounting Standards Board, which the IFRS Foundation oversees. The main new standard is the insurance contracts standard that the IASB released in January.

Like the U.S. GAAP taxonomy overseen by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the SEC in the U.S., the IFRS taxonomy uses Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, data-tagging technology, which enables investors and financial analysts to do comparisons more easily across companies and industries.

The IFRS Taxonomy helps companies file their financial statements with regulators that comply with IFRS standards. The latest taxonomy reflects the presentation and disclosure requirements in IFRS and their accompanying materials. The IFRS Taxonomy also includes elements for disclosures not specifically required by IFRS standards that companies typically report.

Updates to the taxonomy are released throughout the year to reflect changes to IFRS standards, common reporting practice by companies that apply IFRS Standards, along with general improvements to the IFRS Taxonomy or technology changes. The IFRS Taxonomy 2018 incorporates the IFRS Taxonomy Update for IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts published in January.

The IFRS Foundation also published on Friday the IFRS Taxonomy Update—Annual Improvements and the IFRS Taxonomy Update—Prepayments Features with Negative Compensation (Amendments to IFRS 9). The IFRS Taxonomy 2018 incorporates the changes resulting from these two updates. For the IFRS Taxonomy 2018 files and supporting information, visit the IFRS Taxonomy 2018 page.

Separately, for U.S. companies, the SEC announced an update Friday to the XBRL taxonomy for financial filers. Earlier this week, the online EDGAR system was upgraded to Release 18.1 and now supports the 2018 U.S. GAAP, 2018 SEC Reporting (SRT), 2018 Document and Entity Information (DEI), 2018 Exchanges (EXCH), 2018 State and Province (STPR) and 2018 Risk-Return (RR) taxonomies. The 2018 U.S. GAAP financial reporting taxonomy and the 2018 SEC Reporting Taxonomy reflect the same taxonomies that FASB made available on its website last December.

The 2018 DEI, 2018 EXCH, 2018 STPR and 2018 RR taxonomies reflect the same taxonomies the staff posted for public comment on Oct. 2, 2017, modified for six elements added to DEI 2018 for voluntary reporting of additional EDGAR submission header data. The registry of unit types was updated to version 2017-07-12 of the XBRL Units Registry (UTR) at http://www.xbrl.org/utr/2017-07-12/utr.xml. Users can refer to the Release Notes for SEC Taxonomies 2018 for further details on the changes. The SEC staff doesn’t anticipate that the removals of the 2016 US GAAP, 2013 DEI, 2009 DEI, 2016 EXCH, and 2010 Risk-Return taxonomies will occur before June 2018, the SEC noted.