Dry Run Makes a Splash

November 30th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Here in the UK, all central government bodies that produce Annual Reports and Accounts in accordance with HM Treasury’s Government Financial Reporting Manual (FReM) are required to include a section in their Annual Report covering their performance on sustainability from 2011-2012. This year, 2010-2011, is termed the ‘dry-run’ year  - a bit like when the S.E.C. trialled XBRL with its voluntary filing program.

The sustainability reporting required is relatively simple but we are warned that ‘the guidance will be updated annually‘ – Government code for expect more complex compliance to come. Note that there is no mention of XBRL so far but the guidance contains lots of excellent information on what a sustainability report could look like and how it is constructed. How soon before the US follows?


Tags:
Posted in Communication, Sustainability | 1 Comment »


For Whom the Bell Tolls

November 8th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Apparently UK-GAAP is dead – according to IASB Chairman Sir David Tweedie – as UK SMEs prepare to adopt FRSME, the IASB’s International Financial Reporting Standard for Smaller Medium Entities (IFRS for SMES).  As opposed to FRSBE, which is the acronym for any financial reporting standard that gets flung around but never held onto long enough to be adopted and FRSKE which is the financial reporting standard for those ‘kewel enterprises’ that the US is so good at creating. And in case you were wondering, FRSME will supplement FRSSE – the Financial Reporting Standard for Smaller Entities – which was presumably invented in the big hair decade of the 80′s.


Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »


Demystifying XBRL (UK-2)

March 10th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

A useful quick summary of What you need to know about XBRL from a UK tax filing perspective can be found on AccountingWeb. A key point is that if you are able to submit a ‘Short Company Tax Return’ via the HMRC’s online portal as a PDF file, then all the necessary conversion to XBRL will be done for you by HMRC’s web application.


Tags:
Posted in XBRL | No Comments »


Demystifying XBRL

February 17th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

KPMG have published some useful guidance for UK corporations in a short paper called Demystifying XBRL. Despite starting with the rather odd assertion that XBRL tags work in a similar way to barcodes (er, no), the paper has lots of great advice for prospective UK filers of iXBRL-based Corporation Tax (CT) returns – especially in sections 6-8. The paper supports the upcoming UK iXBRL Roadshow, which no matter how you spin it, just doesn’t sound that exciting…


Tags: ,
Posted in XBRL | 1 Comment »


Financial Ecosystem Set to Grow in UK?

August 30th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

According to the UK’s HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) website:

From April 2011 under UK Government proposals, all companies, clubs, societies, associations and other unincorporated bodies who are required to make a Company Tax Return will have to:

- file their company tax returns online for all returns delivered after 31 March 2011 for accounting periods ending after 31 March 2010, using a specified XBRL data standard for accounts and computations and

- pay their Corporation Tax electronically.

Under these proposals HMRC will not accept:

- a company tax return and required attachments filed on paper when it should have been filed online

- any returns filed online with accounts and computations sent as Portable Document Format (PDF) attachments – all returns delivered after 31 March 2011 for accounting periods ending after 31 March 2010, must be filed using inline XBRL (iXBRL).

This means that all corporate tax filings and legal entity/group statutory accounts prepared under UK GAAP or IFRS will be filed to HMRC using a version of XBRL, significantly enlarging the taxonomy-based financial information ecosystem both in the UK and globally. Read the rest of this entry »


Tags: ,
Posted in XBRL | No Comments »