The federal ernment has proposed that the adoption of a software language to automate the lodgement of finance statements to ASIC online be mandatory as a voluntary scheme has failed.

Standardised Business Reporting allows panies to lodge financial statements to the ATO,ASIC,APRA and state ernment agencies online and automatically populate ernment systems.

Large businesses have been slow to adopt the system as it requires updates to aounting and tax software that inrporates the use of extensible business markup language (XBRL)which applies machine readable tags to financial information so it can be automatically read without the need for re-keying.

But while there has been a big increase in recent months by small business lodging tax returns and Business Activity Statements,an options paper released by the federal Treasury says software panies haven’t included XBRL because it isn’t pulsory.

“The use of SBR for the lodgement of financial reports is currently nstrained by the limited number of SBR-enabled software products in the market,particularly for large business,and the voluntary nature of the SBR program,”said the paper.

But equally it said “a sufficiently large number of users has not emerged that would act as a catalyst to generate the development of software products for financial reporting more widely usable across industry”.

Once implemented it allows finance teams to employ less staff and rces errors.

Since July,more than 100,000lodgements of tax information had been made via SBR,nine times more than in the same period in 2011.

The use of SBR is being made mandatory for the electronic transfer of superannuation funds between member aounts under the super reforms being introduced.

It is now mandatory for the largest panies in the US to report using XBRL to the Securities and Exchange mission and Brazil is planning to make it pulsory as well.

Once in place,the ultimate beneficiary should be investors and analysts who will be able to use the same software language to extract data and pare financial reports the options paper says.

Chair of the international aounting standards board,Hans Hoogervorst,said earlier this year he was disappointed in the take-up of XBRL,especially that they had failed to nvince investors of its worth.

Submissions to the options paper close on March 15,2013.

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