International SBR
Overview
Government requirements to report financial information create administrative burdens for businesses throughout the world. The lack of a common reporting standard/language makes these burdens onerous, as businesses have to tailor, duplicate and individually supply information to meet the many and varied requirements imposed by domestic and international government agencies and regulators. The Australian SBR Program is following the lead of the Netherlands SBR Program, working across agencies to agree with a single set of definitions of the information being reported from businesses to various government agencies.
Both the Netherlands and the Australian SBR Programs are using an international open standard to define the information being reported to government: eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). XBRL is a reporting language and standard that has been developed by the accounting community specifically for financial and business performance reporting. It allows for the tagging and electronic communication of business and financial data.
Rather than treating financial information as a block of text, as in a standard internet page or a printed document, XBRL allocates a computer readable identifying tag for each individual item of data. This enables reporting software to collect relevant data and place it in the appropriate financial reports. Businesses and accountants gain significant benefits through easier preparation, analysis and communication of information. These benefits include cost savings, greater efficiency, and improved accuracy and reliability of information.
Many other countries are using XBRL for financial and banking supervisor reporting. There are significant benefits in the use of XBRL in this field of reporting, but the true benefits start to accrue when the reporting requirements of many (such as government regulators) are defined in a single set of definitions, such that once mapped, the information might serve multiple reporting purposes.
The Netherlands
The first country to embark on a standard business reporting program was the Netherlands. The Netherlands is one country which is leading the way in collaboration across agencies to achieve a single reporting language and implement a Standard Business Reporting Program.
Since January 2007, Dutch businesses and accounting firms have been able to map their financial data to the Dutch taxonomy and send reports directly from their software to the right agency. In the Netherlands, the agencies include the tax administration, the bureau of statistics and the chamber of commerce. Businesses who use the facilities of the Dutch SBR program are able to save up to 25 per cent of their compliance reporting costs.
In the Netherlands the number of elements reported between companies to the government was reduced from 200,000 down to 4,500.
The Netherlands Government continues to work directly with software developers, reporting professionals and business to enable SBR reporting to become a by-product of the information already in the businesses’ software packages. Doing so enables SBR to be used not only for reporting to multiple regulators, but also for improving internal reporting and analysis. For more information see the Netherlands SBR Program website.
Australia
The Australian Government model for SBR closely follows the development in the Netherlands with the key concept based on collaboration across multiple agencies to achieve a single set of definitions for information that businesses report to government. The Australian SBR Program continues to benefit from the ongoing sharing of knowledge and provision of advice from the Netherlands SBR Program. The reporting definitions are brought together in a 'reporting taxonomy' in XBRL, and can be mapped to the data in businesses systems to enable a pre-filling of government reports. In the development of the Australian SBR Taxonomy the process of harmonising reporting elements saw 9648 different data fields reduced to 2838 unique definitions - a 71 per cent reduction. The Australian SBR Program was approved by the Australian Government in August 2007 and implemented on 1 July 2010.
New Zealand
Since the New Zealand Government's announcement in May 2008, the New Zealand Standard Business Reporting (SBR) program has completed a cost and benefit analysis; conceptual design development; undertaken initial stakeholder consultation; and the scoping of the rationalisation of forms currently in use by participating SBR agencies.
On 2 June 2009 the New Zealand Cabinet agreed to a number of small scale initiatives focusing on the SBR goals of compliance reduction, facilitating the productivity and capability of small and medium enterprises and supporting the Single Economic Market objectives.
This program of work continues to support the broad goals of SBR including the harmonisation of government data requests. For 2009/10, one of the three SBR work streams includes Inland Revenue and Statistics New Zealand harmonising a number of high compliance cost forms incrementally to create a definitional taxonomy and a reporting taxonomy around the Goods and Services Tax (GST) data set.
The SBR Taxonomy and software development work in Australia will influence the development of the taxonomy in New Zealand.
Singapore
The Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) of Singapore has implemented XBRL reporting at the back of their on-line portal, i.e. if a business completes a form online, XBRL tags are attached at the back of the form. Singapore joined the SBR International Forum in May 2009 and hosted the Forum's October meeting.
For more information contact sbr@treasury.gov.au
