XBRL in de accountancy- en taxwereld - Nationale Bank van België

Executive summary (Engels)
“What is the future of XBRL in the accountancy and tax world” We will try to answer
this question in the following paper.
XBRL or „eXtensible Business Reporting Language‟ is based on XML. Its purpose is to
optimize financial information. By using the Internet, financial reporting is possible for
both internal as external business data.
Charles Hoffman, an American accountant and founder of XBRL, states that there have
been several grounds for the development of XBRL. The most important ones are the
need of transparency and standardization of external reporting, the internationalization
and the high administrative costs.
XBRL has been composed of 3 fundamentals: the taxonomy, the style sheet and the
financial data. All these elements form an instance document that, for example, can be
compared to an official completed annual report of the National Bank of Belgium.
The taxonomy lays down the structure and the links between the reported data, while
the style sheet is responsible for the layout and the output of the instance document.
There are many non-profit associations in the world which promote XBRL. The highest
authority is „XBRL International‟, followed by „XBRL Europe‟. This association includes
„XBRL Belgium‟, „XBRL The Netherlands‟,...
Belgian accountants report according to the BE GAAP standards. On an international
level however, they will have to switch to the IFRS-standards, to increase the success
of XBRL.
In Belgium, the implementation of XBRL is effected in different phases. They started
with filing the annual accounts in an XBRL-size and continued with the structural survey
of the FPS Economy. In 2011, XBRL will be available for the corporation tax declaration.
Unlike The Netherlands, free basic software is offered in Belgium. The application
„Sofista‟ is used for filing the annual accounts and „Vensoc‟ for filing the corporation tax
declaration. The structural survey is also submitted in XBRL-size. Some companies are
compelled to file this, in order to provide information for economic statistics.
Software companies such as Kluwer and Intersentia sell applications, which have more
options than the free software, such as an automatic financial analysis.
Belgium and The Netherlands are not the only countries that operate with XBRL. At an
international level, we have for instance Reuters and KOSDAQ in Asia.
Generally, XBRL has many advantages, such as a gain in time, cost savings, increased
transparency and quality of the data. However, there are also disadvantages, such as
the big investments for the government and the unfamiliarity of users and companies
with XBRL, including in the accountancy and tax world.
Currently there are no alternatives to XBRL, but future perspectives all the more. We
assume that there will be a European XBRL-standard within 10 or 15 years.
We recommend to Ernst & Young to continue promoting XBRL and following the
changes very closely so they can contribute to the development of XBRL.
Eindproef BEM Project E&Y: EP0910_16 12