UK modernising corporate reporting
The UK government has opened a wide-ranging consultation on modernising corporate reporting, with the future of structured reporting a central topic within proposed simplification efforts.
Published by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade on 7 September, the consultation runs until 30 November 2026 and devotes a full chapter to what it calls corporate reporting “for the digital age.”
First, the government proposes giving the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) statutory powers to set the technical standards for electronic formatting, the taxonomies that govern digital tagging. Companies House already allows voluntary iXBRL filing with a minimum set of tags, and from April 2028 all companies will be required to file accounts via commercial software under separate reforms. The consultation suggests building on this over time by requiring increased levels of tagging across more of the annual report, not just the financial statements.
Secondly, it proposes to weave tagging into the governance chain. Directors would approve the electronic formatting when they sign off the accounts, rather than at the point of filing, and auditors would report on whether the reports have been tagged correctly against the applicable taxonomy. That would give tagged data a level of formal assurance it does not currently carry and enhance trust in the information users draw from electronically formatted accounts.
The report also tackles the elephant in the debate: AI. It acknowledges that current AI tools can analyse annual reports more accurately when the information is digitally tagged, which points toward more extensive mandatory tagging. But it also notes the counter-claims that some have made: that rapidly improving AI and data-mining tools might one day be able to extract insight from PDFs without any tagging at all. It is asking investors, creditors and technology experts to weigh in on the question. In our opinion, reliable machine analysis is far better served by data structured at source than by AI left to interpret an unstructured document after the fact. We need a single version of the digital truth. Not a multitude of AI guesses.
This is a consultation worth a careful response. The proposals on FRC standard-setting powers, expanded tagging and auditor assurance would meaningfully shape the UK’s digital reporting landscape, and the AI question goes to the heart of why structured reporting matters.
Read the consultation here.
