The IFRS Foundation is aepting ments on an exposure draft of the IFRS Taxonomy 2011 interim release reflecting disclosures that are monly reported by entities in their IFRS financial statements. The tags are intended to supplement the 2011 IFRS Taxonomy to enhance the parability of financial information, nsistent with IFRSs and with the XBRL architecture of the IFRS Taxonomy.

The Foundation has heard from nstituents who are ncerned that the current IFRS taxonomy may be challenging to use because it ntains so few tags when pared with the U.S. GAAP Taxonomy. The IFRS taxonomy ntains some 2,550 elements while the GAAP taxonomy ntains about 13,000.

The key difference is that GAAP is more prescriptive, so there are more specific requirements that can be described by more detailed, more precisely defined tags. IFRS is based more on principles than prescriptive requirements, so it’s simply not as straightforward to establish precise tags for every nceivable way panies might elect to report something.

The interim release attempts to address this problem by establishing additional tags for mon practice ncepts. The Foundation’s XBRL team studied the financial statements of about 200 panies that report under IFRS in untries and industries throughout the world, identifying disclosures that are most mon among those panies. The tags in the interim release reflect those most monly reported practices.

These 300 additional tags do not represent IFRS requirements, but they do represent the disclosures that are most mon among panies that report under IFRS. When these tags are finalized, entities will be able to apply the tags to line items in their primary financial statements and to notes and aounting policies using text blocks. They will require fewer entity-specific tags, which will rce divergence in reporting practice, which in turn will improve the parability of all IFRS financial information.

While some perceived there are architectural differences between GAAP and IFRS taxonomies, in truth the only differences lie in the underlying aounting rules. And even those differences are narrowing as the International Aounting Standards Board and the Financial Aounting Standards Board seek to nverge the two different sets of aounting standards. If an XBRL preparer is moving from one aounting standard to another, the same XBRL software can be utilized.

The IFRS taxonomy is ntinuously updated to reflect changes in aounting standards as they are released by the IASB. This assures panies referring to the taxonomy can be nfident they reflect the latest IFRSs as they are issued and bee requirements for IFRS filers. This is important given how dispersed IFRS filers and XBRL filers are around the globe. To date, some 120 untries have adopted IFRS, and about 25 of those untries are now using or implementing the IFRS taxonomy for XBRL filings.

It will be important for the IFRS Foundation to receive broad feedback to the taxonomy’s interim release to assure it aurately reflects the reporting practices most mon among IFRS filers. This is the only way to assure the greatest parability possible, which is essentially if XBRL is to truly bee a useful reporting platform.