Convergence is a term we hear a great deal these days to describe efforts to reduce the major differences between International Financial Reporting Standards and other major systems of accounting, especially the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles followed in the United States.

However, convergence can also be used to describe the efforts under way among XBRL teams in various countries. At the IFRS Foundation, our XBRL team is working with the XBRL team at the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the team in Japan developing the Electronic Disclosure for Investors NETwork (EDINET) to reduce significant differences in our respective Taxonomies.

While IFRS and GAAP preparers in particular may find some differences in the way specific tags are named, or specific definitions for those tags are worded, the goal is to assure the tags in the IFRS and GAAP taxonomies for comparable elements are essentially the same. Both XBRL teams have worked through existing standards to develop tags, so now going forward it is our goal to produce tags in tandem with the issuance of standards.

For example, the XBRL teams for IFRS and GAAP meet twice monthly to discuss new standards that are being developed by the FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board. At these sessions, we work to identify and refine the tags that will be necessary to reflect those standards that are developing, mindful to assure they will carry the same essential meanings in both IFRS and GAAP. Then as we update our respective Taxonomies and received feedback and comments on those changes, we can further assess the extent to which they both reflect the accounting standards and assure the greatest possible level of comparability.

We follow a similar process in working with the EDINET team at Japan’s Financial Services Agency, although this system of electronic, data-interactive filing is not quite as mature as XBRL for IFRS and GAAP at this point in time.

The goal is to assure that preparers and users of XBRL-submitted data can use any tool in the marketplace – Hitachi, SAP, Oracle, or any other of the myriad choices that are developing – and encounter no technical difficulties when they switch from filings submitted under different accounting conventions. We want to assure users can navigate whatever tool they’ve chosen without any difference in how the tags function or define financial data submitted under different sets of accounting standards.

As preparers and users of financial statements continue to navigate through XBRL architecture to find and use financial statement data, XBRL teams will be listening for feedback on how well we’ve met the objective of assuring comparability.