This Week in XBRL - IFRS Foundation, Foreign Private Issuers and XBRL Accounts,

In a continued effort to educate on the development of XBRL technology in industries such as financial services (and beyond), Merrill Corporation will share articles and columns published on the topic.

Because Merrill enjoys columns that promote activities we focus on as a company, our favorite XBRL story of the week was on promoting XBRL Accounts, as well as the organizations that have an expertise in the technology (such as Merrill, who created the  XBRL Complete platform and has an in-house team of experts). We thought the best part was this excerpt:

While iXBRL and XBRL accounts are unknown words for many companies there is no need to lose any sleep over it. There are some highly professional organizations that have started working on these languages and they have been providing professional consulting to some of the best companies in the world already. These professional consultants help companies outsource their financial report preparation and also help them prepare the reports in-house. 

However, there were also two interesting, industry-focused pieces, both of which involved the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The first focused on the SEC ruling that foreign private users that use the IFRS to file in XBRL may be provided with additional time beyond June 1 because of the lack of specifics provided regarding the taxonomy that should be followed. The SEC sent a letter to the Center for Audit Quality in this regard, which can be viewed here. We will be very interested in seeing that the official ruling ends up being.

The other IFRS / XBRL-related news concerned the IFRS Foundation announcing it will be publishing supplementary tags for the IFRS Taxonomy. These "common-practice tags" will improve the ability to compare information by enabling entities to create IFRS financial statements with fewer entity-specific taxonomy tags. These new tags will be developed by the IFRS through the analysis of more than 200 financial statements, including statements of financial position, comprehensive income, cash flows and changes in equity, and block-tagged notes and accounting policies—that have been prepared in accordance with IFRS by entities across geographical areas and industries, and including financial institutions and insurance companies. They will be published as a draft supplement to the IFRS Taxonomy 2011. This information is just the latest example of how important consistently-improving taxonomy will play in the growth, adoption and understanding of XBRL by companies large and small. Very few - if any - financial services and IT experts have suggested that it is anything but essential.

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