How the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency Will Make Use of XBRL By Michael Rugaard Programme Manager

The Danish Commerce and Companies Agency  Is an agency under The Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs  Administrates the law on  companies  accounts and  certain parts of business law  Receives annual accounts and company information from businesses  Keeps registers of this information available to the general public

Business reporting today  All annual filings are:  received on paper  scanned  to a certain extent retyped into a structured form by third party vendors of financial information  The filings are frequently made by the company’s accountant, using:  Microsoft Office  Caseware  Local brand accountancy software (i.e.: “Focus IT”)  “Homemade” software  The companies often use ERP systems emanating from MBS Navision  (Axapta, Navision, Concorde, C5 etc)

DCCA and Digital Filing  DCCA has been working with digital filing since the 1990’s  Different Technologies applied since without much success  EDIFACT  XML  Digital filing through XBRL starts – on a voluntary basis at the 3rd of January 2005  Focus must be on user friendliness

Objectives for digital reporting  Increase the level of service provided to businesses  Enable faster and more cost-efficient regulatory control  Enable reuse of data across organizational boundaries (one-stop-Government)  Reduce reporting burdens and costs for businesses  Reduce costs and burdens related to consuming financial data

Why XBRL  XBRL could be the missing link in the supply chain  XBRL gives advantages to end users of data  and to filers as well as it becomes lingua franca

DCCA and XBRL  The DCCA has developed an XBRL- taxonomy (working draft)  The taxonomy will be expanded to cover the needs of other government institutions  The taxonomy can be used free of charge by anyone interested

The Flow Mail/Browser ERP System System for creating annual reports BusinessAccountantDCCA B) containing: 1) Annual report 2) Digital Annual Report (XBRL) containing some of the facts and a PDF with all the facts Digital signature on report shown in browser Trial balance A) containing: 1) Annual report 2) Digital Annual Report (XBRL) containing some of the facts and a PDF with all the facts Management Report

Making Data Available  The DCCA will provide financial (XBRL) data  Through our own user interface with limited functionality as well as  By selling data bulk to third party vendors  By providing general system-to-system user interfaces (web services)

The DCCA said all this a year and a half ago in Amsterdam – why has nothing happened…?  Well, it has, but:  We have been too ambitious  We have had to overcome too many technical problems  XBRL wasn’t as readily available in user software as expected

Too Ambitious…  We wanted the entire annual filing in a structured digital form! But:  Nobody is going to bother do all mapping that voluntarily  Nobody really needs all that  A taxonomy can’t really express all the quirks of Danish lawmaking in this field  It is neither technically nor practically feasible to ensure that an all-encompassing taxonomy is used correctly  We wanted to create correct presentations of data in the XBRL-filings in their entirety  …This was where we found out about what was technically feasible and what was not

Too many technical obstacles  Problems we brought onto ourselves  We did not work with Proof of Concepts for  The use of our taxonomy (its internal logic)  Support for XBRL in user-software  The possibility of making a style sheet that would work for any (Danish annual) XBRL-filing  It wasn’t until late in the process that we gained knowledge about the real life use scenarios for our taxonomy  XBRL-problems (relating to spec. 2.0a)  When we started out, our developers basically had to invent every single tool for themselves  Certain XBRL schemas didn’t parse correctly in major XML parsers  There seemed to be flaws in the spec’s

XBRL was (is?) not always so well implemented in user software  An important provider of accountancy- software had implemented one sub-set of XBRL  An important provider of ERP-software had implemented another sub-set of XBRL  We needed both subsets and then some  Lesson: It is important to see, that XBRL- enabled software supports at least the same core specifications of XBRL.

Our Approach  We encourage cross sectored support for XBRL  We do this on a number of levels and  With a number of actors  We share our experiences and results ----  XBRL should follow the same lines of development as regular XML and be  Backwards compatible

So, what does the DCCA do now?  We are getting more user focused by  issuing a smaller taxonomy only containing data elements that are in high demand  and that emanate directly from ERP-systems for the most part  We do not upgrade to spec. 2.1 of XBRL  Until we have seen it work across software platforms  We do not try and make presentations of instance documents, but plan to live in a mixed environment (XBRL + PDF) for a while  We don’t do anything new in this field without POC  We keep supporting and evangelizing XBRL throughout the Administration  We will do pilot scale tests with large providers of annual filings  …and we hope to receive filings during 2005!