In October 2010, the Ministry of Finance of P.R.C. issued the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards, the Standardization Administration of the People’s Republic of China issued four national standards concerning XBRL specifications, whose drafting was sponsored by the ministry and which are put under centralized management by the ministry, including the "eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) Technical Specification Part 1: Base" (GB / T 25500.1-2010). In December 2010, the ministry issued the "notice on the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards" (Cai Kuai [2010] No. 23), requiring the first batch of the 13 enterprises including PetroChina and 12 accounting firms including RSM China to launch the implementation of the standards. In January 2011, the “notice on several issues concerning the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards” (Cai Ban Kuai [2011] No. 2) jointly issued by the ministry and the China Securities Regulatory Commission added some requirements on the relevant issues concerning the implementation. Since then, the implementation by the first batch of units has been in full swing. After six months of intense efforts, all the enterprises and accounting firms exercising the implementation have recently successfully completed the preparation of the instance documents for 2010 financial statements of accounting standards in compliance with the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards and the extension taxonomy of the accounting standards, submitting 606 XBRL instance documents in total. The results of the recent test for the documents submitted by the 13 enterprises indicate that the financial statements in the form of XBRL submitted by the enterprises are adequately in compliance with the XBRL standards and rules, fulfilling all the requirements put forward in the notice on the implementation.

As electronic standards for financial statements in strict compliance with both the XBRL specifications and the corporate accounting standards, the general purpose taxonomy has undergone a milestone attempt of the standardization of the electronic financial statements in the context of informationization and network in the process of the implementation, which is more challenging than the implementation of the accounting standards with the involvement of the various elements such as accounting, XBRL technologies, and the management and control of the preparation of the statements. With the organization and arrangements of the ministry as well as the effective cooperation of the relevant departments and enterprises, the first batch of the units exercising the implementation have presented valuable practices by doing the work with enthusiasm, initiative and innovation, providing references for the extended implementation of the general purpose taxonomy. The general introduction to the implementation and the tests in the first batch of implementing units will be made as follows, followed by the valuable practices of the implementing enterprises and the work of the implementing accounting firms for extensive references.

1. Features and Advantages of XBRL

The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a newly emerging computer language in the world, widely used in the electronic reporting such as the financial reporting, regulatory reporting and tax reporting. On the XBRL reporting platform, the government departments and the accounting standards drafting and regulatory bodies draw up the electronic reporting standards in line with financial reporting standards, regulatory rules or tax laws and regulations in accordance with the XBRL specifications, the enterprises tag the report data in accordance with the taxonomy to prepare and generate the financial statements, regulatory reports or tax reports ("instance documents") in the format of XBRL, and the users of the enterprise reports may open and access the instance documents to recognize, retrieve, analyze or process the specific data required ("parsing") on the computer by means of the software tools adopting the XBRL specifications.

In the traditional condition, the analysis and management of the data on the computer require the creation and maintenance of a dedicated database, which features high costs, unwieldiness and limited applications, and requires prominent modifications in the cases of the changes in the regulatory rules or the users’ demands. In the analysis and management of the data of the enterprise reports through the XBRL, it is not necessary to create or maintain a dedicated database nor frequently recreate or modify a large database as a result of the changes in standards, rules or regulations.

For the common users of the corporate reporting information, since the XBRL provides a large amount of information that the computer can " read directly" on the Internet, the threshold for the use and analysis of corporate information has been lowered so that the users can customize the data based on the corporate reporting information to their needs. For government departments and regulatory agencies, the management and analysis of the corporate reporting information will be more timely, normalized and standardized, and in particular, it will facilitate the exchange and verification of the corporate reporting information among the regulatory authorities to form the unified sources of corporate information and enhance the regulatory efficiency substantially. For enterprises, the XBRL can be extended to the internal management reporting to enhance the sophistication of the internal management, and on the other hand, the XBRL, which is adopted by more and more government departments and regulatory agencies, provides a common platform for the multi-objective corporate reporting system, which will reduce the enterprises’ burden in delivering reports remarkably.

2. Arrangements for XBRL Promotion by Ministry of Finance

The ministry has always been attaching great importance to the efforts in accounting computerization and informationization, actively promoting the establishment of the relevant standards, improving the management system and constantly pushing forward the extensive application of the information technology in accounting. Since the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" period, in response to the development of the information technology, the ministry has set up the objectives for pushing ahead the accounting informationization in China in an all-around manner by “improving a system, establishing a platform, forming a set of standards, building a team and fostering an industry".

In 2008, the ministry took the initiative to set up the Accounting Informationization Committee, whose members include the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, People's Bank of China, National Audit Office, State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, China Banking Regulatory Commission, China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Insurance Regulatory Commission, State Administration of Taxation and other government departments and regulatory bodies, as well as relevant academic institutions and enterprises. The Accounting Informationization Committee is also the XBRL China Steering Committee. The committee takes advantage of the application of XBRL to energetically promote the standardization of the electronic financial statements and regulatory reports, on which basis to push forward the comprehensive accounting informationization. With this platform, the leading forces in the XBRL application research in the country organized by the ministry and the effective support by the Standardization Administration of China, China Securities Regulatory Commission and other authorities, the ministry has introduced relevant standards to develop a series of national standards of XBRL specification, and has drawn up the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards on the basis of the electronic financial statement standards in the accounting standards and through strict procedures and quite a few rounds of extensive opinion solicitation. Meanwhile, the XBRL International formally approved the XBRL China to become one of its national members in April 2010.

The 21st International XBRL Conference was held in Beijing in October 2010, when the serial XBRL national standards and the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards were officially published, universalizing the technical specifications and professional standards for preparation of the enterprises’ financial statements in the format of XBRL according to the accounting standards, setting aside the interface for the drafting of the XBRL taxonomy of regulatory standards based on the corporate accounting standards and providing standardized solutions to the computer-aided processing of the information of the electronic financial statements and other information of the enterprise reports.

In accordance with the principle of "being active yet prudent, leading the way and exploring the new paths, analyzing the experience and pushing forward step by step”, the ministry launched the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy in January 2011. At the launching meeting of the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy held on January 12, 2011, Vice Minister Wang Jun required that the financial authorities at all levels, the first batch of the units exercising the implementation, software manufacturers and providers and academic and research institutes should make sure a successful beginning, concerted efforts and steadfast progress in the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy.

In accordance with the implementation plan, the first batch of the units exercising the implementation include two groups with the first group formed by 13 large enterprises, including 10 enterprises listed in China or on the New York Stock Exchange and the second group being 12 accounting firms and their audit clients of the domestic A-share mainboard companies (591 companies in total). The enterprises of the first group may prepare the instance documents of the 2010 financial statements with the tools software and in the ways selected on their own in accordance with the notice on the implementation. Collaborating with the clients of the listed companies, the accounting firms of the second group adopted the preparation software provided by the ministry to generate the instance documents of the 2010 financial statements for the 591 listed companies. In the meantime, the ministry organized several events of training and on-site exchange to learn about the progress of the implementation, recommend the successful experience and help solve the technical problems. What is worthy of recognition is that while paying close attention to the implementation in the relevant enterprises and accounting firms in the province, the Department of Finance of Yunnan Province applied for the list of the two Yunnan Province companies of Yuntianhua Group Co., Ltd. and Shenji Group Kunming Machine Tool Co., Ltd. in the first group in a bid to lead the way, explore the new paths and accumulate the experience for the gradual implementation of the general purpose taxonomy in the local enterprises. In late May, the professional personnel organized by the ministry compared notes with the Department of Finance of Yunnan Province and the two companies on site in Kunming in hope to help them with the implementation.

With the concerted efforts of all parties, the 13 implementing enterprises the submitted the instance documents and the preliminary versions of the extension taxonomy of the accounting standards on May 31, the 12 accounting firms submitted the instance documents and the extension taxonomy of the accounting standards of the audit clients of the 591 listed companies on June 30, and the two Yunnan Province companies submitted the achievements of the implementation recently. The tests showed the relatively satisfactory quality of the 606 instance documents in total, which can realize the anticipated functions and effects. Relying on the data in the format of XBRL, we are currently carrying out the in-depth study of the application of the data in the XBRL format in the fields of macroeconomic management and business operation.

It is worth noting that, since the publication of the general purpose taxonomy, many domestic and foreign software companies have taken the initiative to develop tools software that can analyze the general purpose taxonomy. Since the general purpose taxonomy is in strict compliance with the national standards in the technical specifications and in line with the XBRL International specifications plus the framework design consistent with the international mainstream technologies of the XBRL financial statements, the development cycle of the tools for the analysis of the general purpose taxonomy is rather short. The basic industrial chain has taken shape in just six months.

Meanwhile, the China Banking Regulatory Commission has made another breakthrough in the application of the XBRL in the country by successfully developing the extension taxonomy of standards for banking regulatory report forms, achieving the extension of the general purpose taxonomy in the regulatory sectors for the first time.

3. General Results of Tests for First Implementing Enterprises

We have implemented rigorous tests for the materials submitted by the first batch of the 13 implementing enterprises. In order to ensure the quality of the tests, we have well arranged for the personnel and the program.

Internationally, we invited the technical experts of the XBRL panel of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation to carry out the tests for the materials submitted by the implementing enterprises one by one. The tests focused on the application of the XBRL specification and the framework of the general purpose taxonomy (the general purpose taxonomy adopts the framework converging with the taxonomy of the International Financial Reporting Standards.) and the test reports, which were made in accordance with the standards of the Global Filing Manual (GFM) published by the IFRS Foundation and the EDGAR Filer Manual (EFM) of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), were issued for each enterprise.

In China, we have developed two separate sets of the tools software for the tests, and by means of the verification through the tools software in combination with the examination by the experts, the comprehensive tests have been implemented to the instance documents and the extension taxonomy of the standards submitted by the implementing enterprises with test reports issued to each enterprise. In addition, we have invited the software developers, accounting firms and research institutions with strong XBRL technical capacity to perform independent tests for the materials submitted by the implementing enterprises.

Considering the test results from the two sources, the instance documents and the extension taxonomy of the standards submitted by the first batch of the implementing enterprises fairly comply with the serial national standards for the XBRL specification published by the Standardization Administration and the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards and the “filing standards for the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards” (Cai Kuai [2011] No. 12) published by the ministry. As the submitted instance documents are well structured and easy to use with the financial data in the annual reports identified scientifically and rationally, the quality of the instance documents is almost equal to that of the instance documents of the listed American companies collected by the SEC, reaching the international advanced level and achieving the requirements of the notice on the implementation. They are actually the excellent models in the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy this year. The detailed descriptions of the tests from the two sources are as follows,

I. Tests of International Panel

The XBRL experts of IFRS Foundation applied such standards as the EFM of the SEC, the most stringent in the area of the XBRL financial reporting in the world, and the GFM of the IFRS Foundation in the testing, which are applicable to the tests for the instance documents prepared in accordance with the generally accepted accounting principles in the US and the taxonomy of the International Financial Reporting Standards and have gone through a large number of tests in practice.

In addition to the Foundation's own XBRL management system of the taxonomy, the experts of the Foundation applied a variety of third-party tools software to the tests for every instance document and the extension taxonomy. The results show that all the instance documents and the extension taxonomies can be properly resolved and the experts of the foundation can easily extract the data in the financial reports tagged in line with the general purpose taxonomy on the computer.

The instance documents and the extension taxonomy of four of the enterprises (China National Petroleum Corporation, China Petrochemical Corporation, Huaneng Power International, Inc. and China Development Bank) are error-free or only have very few errors (i.e., only one error in the 1000-plus data items). The experts of the Foundation believe that even with compared to items submitted by the major U.S. listed companies to the SEC, the quality of the instance documents and the extension taxonomy of the companies is very high. Another seven companies find a small number of errors of filing standards (5-21 items). A small number of the errors of the XBRL specification found in the instance documents and the extension taxonomy of two enterprises have no impact on the analysis of the software. Considering that the EFM is more stringent than the filing standards published by the ministry, the results are not only better than the requirements in the notice on the implementation but also excellent in the professional area of the XBRL in the world. It is worth noting that the above defects do not affect the analysis of the instance documents nor tarnish the achievements. Moreover, the analysis tools used by the foreign experts were developed by the foreign companies that had never participated in or become involved in the drafting of the general purpose taxonomy of Chinese accounting standards. In other words, the general purpose taxonomy provides the universal means for tagging the data of the financial reports in the standardized, universal and international ways and the first batch of the 13 implementing enterprises including PetroChina master the application of the general purpose taxonomy precisely in a relatively short period of time, successfully completing the preparation of the financial statements in the XBRL format.

II. Tests of Domestic Panel

The domestic panel have three objectives in the tests: first, the tests for the compliance of the instance documents and the extension taxonomy submitted by the enterprises with the national standards of the XBRL specification; second, the tests for their compliance with the general purpose taxonomy; third, the tests for their compliance with the filing standards of the general purpose taxonomy. A total of three software developers and accounting firms participated in the development and tests of the two testing tools sponsored by the ministry and eight software developers, accounting firms and research institutions conducted independent tests at the request of the ministry. The general results of the tests from all the sources are as follows,

i. Compliance with Serial National Standards of XBRL Specification

The test results show that only a small number of the implementing enterprises have errors in the XBRL specifications. Although some enterprises find a rather large number of errors and warnings, the proportion is relatively low compared with the test items (a total of 21,088 elements and about 1.2 million test points are applied by the 13 implementing enterprises). The short time taken by the enterprises to achieve such results shows that the enterprises have mastered the XBRL technology, trained a group of accounting and IT personnel who are familiar with the XBRL and laid the foundation for the extensive and in-depth application of the extension of the general purpose taxonomy and the XBRL.

Table 1 Statistical Table for Test Results of Serial National Standards of XBRL Specification

Notes: The names of the implementing enterprises are replaced by the numbers. “Error” is referred to as the problem basically identified as against the XBRL standards or relevant standards in the XBRL documents submitted by the enterprises. "Warning" means that the problem found in the tests can not be identified as in violation of the XBRL standards or relevant standards and the enterprise shall further determine whether it is an error in accordance with the warning and the factors of the contents of the financial statement and the ways of the implementation.

ii. Compliance with General Purpose Taxonomy and Filing Standards

The tests find a small number of problems in the compliance of the enterprises with the general purpose taxonomy and the filing standards as a result of the implementation of the general purpose taxonomy for the first time.

In the aspect of the general purpose taxonomy, there is a comparative concentration of the types of errors. The general purpose taxonomy is the accounting standards formulated in the language of XBRL, which sets the basic requirements for the preparation of the financial statements in XBRL format in line with the accounting standards. Therefore, the proper application of the general purpose taxonomy is critical in the process of the implementation. For example, both incorrect elements matching and u