UK's Companies House To Use XBRL For E-Filing

by Amanda Banks, Tax-News.com, London

05 August 2005

The UK's corporate registry, Companies House, is set to launch a pilot project for e-filing using the controversial reporting data standard XBRL. The project, to be launched towards the end of the year, will allow filers to send in unaudited accounts data tagged in the XBRL format, through accounting software packages developed to work with Companies House systems.

Alternatively, customers will be able to file accounts electronically using intelligent document templates. These will contain in-built guidance and checks to help customers avoid omitting information or miscalculating figures before they upload its contents to Companies House as XBRL.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an XML-based format for financial reporting that provides a computer-readable way to tag more than 2,000 financial data points such as cost, assets, net profit and other values. The SEC has recommended XBRL for reporting, but has held back from making it mandatory in the face of reservations expressed by many industry commentators. In the meantime, data aggregator Edgar Online is converting data reported to the SEC to XBRL, normalizing more than 1,000 data points on at least 12,000 companies.

XBRL works on a similar principle to XML in that it describes the content and structure of data, avoiding the need to open documents to find the information within them. XBRL is a business-reporting extension of that and covers small form-based sets of data through to full financial statements.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland has successfully piloted the use of XBRL in a quarterly business survey. Fujitsu Software Corporation and PricewaterhouseCoopers worked with the CSO in developing this solution. This is the first live implementation of XBRL in Ireland. The CSO stated that when the adoption of XBRL increases in Ireland, the publication of its taxonomy will facilitate companies to complete the survey directly from their accounting systems, making it easier to comply with CSO reporting obligations.

The Abu Dhabi Securities Market has said it will adopt XBRL, and is working with the Association of Accountants and Auditors to establish the standard. But the UK's Inland Revenue and FSA have put back their own schemes to require businesses to file information in the XBRL format until its benefits can be fully realised.

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