Occurrences

Paper

../papers/02-05-06/02-05-06.html

Date of Presentation

Tuesday, 21 May

Time of Presentation

16.45

Presentation Level

In-The-Middle

Abstract

The UK Inland Revenue has closely examined the business case for electronic filing, and rather than taking a paper form-based process and moving it as-is to electronic form, they have looked at the broader context of what's good for filers, vendors, tax administrators, and others. Through the Inland Revenue XBRL Working Group, the Inland Revenue has made a substantial commitment to using XBRL (the Extensible Business Reporting Language) as a component of Corporate Tax filings. XBRL will be used because in the UK, the bulk of a corporate tax filing is taken up with statutory accounts and what is called the 'computation', i.e., the derivation that starts with the statutory accounts and includes adjustments, calculations, depreciation calculations, etc. This information is reusable across many other financial reporting functions, making XBRL an ideal medium for its encoding. The Inland Revenue and tax software vendors in the UK are committing to a timeline for adopting XBRL filings so as to avoid an indefinite period in which 'electronic filing' of data is left in relatively opaque, image oriented file formats.