IFRS Foundation completes first phase of new taxonomy.

The IFRS Foundation has released the first phase of a comprehensive set of extensions to its XBRL taxonomy.

The new release responds to concerns from preparers that important areas such as expense categories do not have an extension and cannot be tagged in XBRL format.

The Foundation has responded by plannning an ‘extension taxonomy’ drawn form common practice and today issued an interim taxonomy providing around 350 extensions for the most common concepts for types of expenses such as ‘sales and marketing’.

‘The common practice concepts are in line with IFRS requirements and will help to alleviate the burden on preparers and to increase the comparability between financial statements in accordance with IFRSs that are electronically submitted,’ said a Foundation spokesperson.

Work is continuing on extensions to the detailed tagging of the footnotes to the financial statements. The IFRS XBRL team expect to publish proposals in October 2011.

For more information about the project, including a snapshot summary and podcast, or to download the taxonomy, +concepts1