Public asked to review and comment
FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) have released the proposed
2012 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy for public review and comment.
The taxonomy uses Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, technology, to code the financial reporting labels in a data-tagged format.
The 2012 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy is expected to be finalized and published in early 2012.
The IFRS XBRL taxonomy is used to help those filing IFRS financial statements electronically to tag the information with identification tags, also known as “concepts.” Currently, the IFRS taxonomy includes all of the core concepts included in IFRS 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 analyzing and drawing from common practice. For instance, although IFRS requires the disclosure of an analysis of expenses, IFRS does not include a prescriptive listing of all of the possible categories of expenses. The common-practice taxonomy includes concepts for the most commonly used types of expenses, such as “sales and marketing.”
The deadline to submit written comments is Oct. 31, 2011. Comments may be submitted via
FASB’s website.