Written by Nils-Bro Müller Posted on October 8, 2009
Nils-Bro Müller is Senior Advisor at the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency (DCCA), where he is responsible for the Danish XBRL solution. He has been working with XBRL since 2005 and is on the board of XBRL Denmark.
Denmark, where XBRL will be mandatory for company reports in 2011, has been making significant progress toward adopting XBRL since it became an Established Jurisdiction in November 2007. Starting in March 2008, small- and medium-size companies have been able to submit full annual reports in XBRL to the DCCA, the official registrar for Danish companies. As well, the submission taxonomy encompasses tagging for transmitting data to the Danish tax authorities and Statistics Denmark. All companies need to do is submit their data to the DCCA once yearly in XBRL format; the DCCA segregates and processes the document’s data and re-transmits it to other relevant public agencies. A company’s accountants can upload instance documents to the DCCA portal from their own computer; they also can use a Web service that delivers an instance directly to the DCCA’s backend.
One of the DCCA’s main objectives in publishing these reports is ensuring that their display and presentation be exactly the same as when they were signed at a company’s general assembly (stockholders) meeting. Therefore companies (or their accountants) choose a style sheet to be uploaded with the XBRL instance document. DCCA has developed a default style sheet that can handle the “look” of company accounts’ annual filing, which we expect many firms will use, but we can accept any PDF style sheet that the company or its accountants choose. We publish both PDF and XBRL versions of each financial statement, and an Excel version can be chosen as well.
Our XBRL implementation is based on the same software as that used for the Spain’s national banks’ XBRL solution. This platform originally was developed by Software AG in Spain, but DCCA converted this to run on a Linux platform. The application front-end and enterprise service bus (ESB) are standard JBoss software, which we use in many of our applications.
Our taxonomy is approximately 2,900 elements and includes both Danish and English text. Currently it covers what are classified in Denmark as Class B companies, which represent approximately 90% of all Danish companies. The taxonomy is based on the EU's accounting directives Nos. 4 and 7, which prescribe P&L and balance sheet, as well as generally accepted accounting principles for Danish small companies (mainly for the notes to the statements). The taxonomy encompasses a full annual report, containing the following sections: statement by the board of executives and board of directors, independent auditor’s report, executive report, accounting policies, profit and loss, balance sheet, and notes.
Our solution was introduced because we believe companies, the financial sector, and the public sector will benefit from significant cost savings when XBRL is used for both internal and external reporting. A current problem is that companies and auditors aren’t yet ready or motivated to use XBRL, nor are systems in place to create instance documents. As a result, thus far we have received a relatively few 250 reports. This paucity of submissions is typical of other countries where XBRL filing is merely voluntary, however. Even though the benefits are well known, nobody seems to file in XBRL before it is mandatory to do so.
This is the paradox — that XBRL’s benefits are manifest, but companies won’t adopt it until they have to — that the international XBRL community must contend with. In my view, we’re currently ignoring that reality. Instead, we praise XBRL and all its benefits in well-worn phases each time we meet at international XBRL conferences.
At any rate, you are welcome to visit our XBRL portal, which is called DRP (digital reporting platform). Unfortunately we only have a Danish version at the moment, and you need a Danish certificate (OCES certifikat) before you can log in. But if you can, have a look.
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