The use of XBRL in Australia is being led by a government initiative, the Standard Business Reporting (SBR) project. Several hundred regulatory forms from various government agencies now have XBRL 2.1 Taxonomies incorporated into a common architecture.

In the SBR architecture the SBR Definitional Taxonomy layer contains the item, common tuple, dimension and dimension member definitions. Taxonomy files in this layer are used to build the taxonomies for each agency's forms, called Reporting Taxonomies. Each reporting taxonomy defines form specific definitional and presentation linkbases using concepts in the SBR Definitional Taxonomy.

The SBR architecture also provides Web Services where the SOAP message payload is an XBRL instance conforming to a particular reporting taxonomy. This has allowed the development of software packages that provide for electronic submission of the regulatory forms.

At this stage, form submissions to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) are performed using their Direct 2 APRA (D2A) software. This is due to the complex validation infrastructure which compares newly submitted data against values submitted in other forms and reporting periods. XBRL instances can be submitted to APRA using the D2A XBRL import facility.

The initial use of XBRL in Australia's regulatory environment has been as an alternative submission format. This provided a challenge in the development of the SBR XBRL Taxonomies because these taxonomies had to cater for the complexities in the existing forms. For APRA, the scale of the challenge was three hundred and fifty forms.

As an aid to understanding the XBRL taxonomies APRA developed a set of on-line documentation , called Plain English Taxonomy (PET), that exposes the XBRL taxonomy information and how that information maps to the data entry screens in the D2A software. It is envisaged that this documentation will assist reporting entities in adopting XBRL for their regulatory submissions.

The future for the use of XBRL in Australia has been boosted by the recent government announcement that the use of the SBR platform will be mandated for superannuation industry transactions.

The PET documentation can be viewed at: 

More information about the SBR Project is available at: