Updated ESEF Taxonomy released by ESMA

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) recently published updated taxonomy to further ease the implementation of the requirements delineated by the Regulatory Technical Standard (RTS) on the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF).

ESEF Taxonomy Update by ESMA

The ESEF taxonomy is based on the IFRS taxonomy along with additional concepts specific for the regulation. The entire taxonomy package is available on ESMA’s website and can be downloaded here . The taxonomy package also includes specific entry point to each of the EU languages. This means, if software provider implements those entry points in their tagging engine, filers can view the standard label of the taxonomy elements in the language of their preference easing the element selection process.

All listed issuers in EU who are publishing as per the Transparency Directive shall prepare their Annual Financial Reports (AFRs) in XHTML format starting from 1 January 2020. Where the AFRs include consolidated financial statements prepared in IFRS, they shall also be marked up with XBRL tags using the Inline XBRL technology. This makes the AFRs both human readable and machine readable. As one of the milestones to this new reporting framework, ESMA has published an updated version of taxonomy much ahead giving sufficient time to the software providers to implement in their platform.

Transition to Inline XBRL will make it much easier for investors and analysts to compare the performance of multiple companies, making benchmarking a much quicker and user-friendly process.

At DataTracks, preparation of Inline XBRL documents is something that we have mastered and honed using our Rainbow Disclosure Management System, a cloud based, collaborative, single source solution for years in various geographies like United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and South Africa. Rainbow is built in modular framework allowing the incorporation of new taxonomy quickly. We participated in ESMA for the field test conducted last year using the IFRS taxonomy and are also one of the recognized software service providers by XBRL Europe. We are also working with issuers and intermediaries to generate sample Inline XBRL using IFRS taxonomy.

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