The Financial Acunting Standards Board and the International Acunting Standards Board have updated the mputer-readable tags for their acunting standards and exposed them for public mment.

FASB released its proposed 2012 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy for public review on Thursday. Like the taxonomy for International Financial Reporting Standards released by the IASB on the same day, it uses Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, technology, to de the financial reporting labels in a data-tagged format.

XBRL makes it easier for investors and analysts to mpare financial results across mpanies and industries, and is now mandated by the Securities and Exchange mission for public mpanies to use in their financial filings. The open-source mputer language allows mpanies to tag thousands of pieces of financial data included in their financial statements and footnote disclosures. The tags let users of financial statements electronically search for, assemble, and process data so the information can be aessed and analyzed by investors, analysts, journalists and regulators.

The proposed 2012 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy includes updates for acunting standards and other remmended improvements to the official taxonomy used by public issuers registered with the SEC.

The deadline to submit written mments is Oct. 31, 2011. The 60-day mment period is intended to solicit feedback from users of the taxonomy and to provide SEC filers, service providers, software vendors, and other interested parties with the opportunity to beme familiar with and suggest revisions to the taxonomy, including inrporating new elements for current filings.

The 2012 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy is expected to be finalized and published in early 2012. The proposed 2012 U.S. GAAP taxonomy and instructions on how to submit mments are available on FASB’s XBRL page.

Questions about using the taxonomy for creating and submitting XBRL-tagged interactive data files in mpliance with SEC rules should be directed to the SEC through the SEC’s portal on XBRL.

In early 2010, the Financial Acunting Foundation, the parent anization of FASB and the ernmental Acunting Standards Board, assumed maintenance responsibilities for the taxonomy. The FAF and FASB assembled a team of technical staff dedicated to updating the taxonomy for changes in U.S. GAAP, while identifying best practices in taxonomy extensions and technical enhancements.

On the international side, the IFRS Foundation, the oversight body of the International Acunting Standards Board, said it mpleted the first part of its project to address requests by regulators and preparers for extensions to the full IFRS XBRL taxonomy.

The IFRS XBRL taxonomy is used to help those filing IFRS financial statements electronically to tag the information with identification tags, also known as “ncepts.” Currently, the IFRS taxonomy includes all of the re ncepts included in IFRS as issued by the IASB.  However, preparers often need to provide more detailed financial information than is reflected by the re IFRS ncepts.

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 mmon 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 mmon-practice taxonomy includes ncepts for the most mmonly used types of expenses, such as “sales and marketing.”

The interim taxonomy released on Thursday mpletes the first part of a project to address this issue, by providing about 350 extensions for the most mmon ncepts used in the financial statements. Work is ntinuing on extensions to the detailed tagging of the footnotes to the financial statements. The IFRS XBRL team expects to publish the proposals in October 2011.

The mmon practice ncepts are in line with IFRS requirements and will help to alleviate the burden on preparers and to increase the mparability between financial statements in acrdance with IFRS that are electronically submitted. 

For more information about the project, including a snapshot summary, podcast and Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, or to download the taxonomy, visit .