Korea rebuilds its XBRL taxonomy for IFRS 18 and opens up notes data
South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) is reorganising its XBRL taxonomy and expanding Open DART, the open-data service attached to its Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System (DART), to make disclosures easier for investors to analyse and reuse.
The taxonomy project is driven by K-IFRS 1118, Korea’s version of IFRS 18. It applies from the 2027 financial year, and the FSS says it calls for changes across its entire XBRL system. The new taxonomy, due out during 2026, will faithfully reflect the IFRS Foundation’s IFRS 18 taxonomy. Korea-specific elements will be added where needed, and similar or duplicate items will be tidied up.
From 2027, notes data will be released note by note through the Open DART application programming interface (API). Until now, XBRL notes data has only been available company by company or as bulk files for the whole market, which reduces the ease of specific, thematic analysis. Under the new approach, a user could pull the property, plant and equipment note for every listed company in one go.
Open DART will also extend to shareholder meetings. More than 95% of listed companies hold their regular meetings in mid-to-late March, leaving institutional investors to work through notices one by one. From the 2027 season, Open DART will provide:
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Meeting dates, record dates and e-voting arrangements;
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A classified summary of every agenda item;
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Detail on director appointments, pay caps for directors and auditors, changes to articles, and approval of financial statements and dividends.
The FSS has been extending XBRL tagging from the face of the financial statements into listed companies’ notes since the 2023 financial year, in a phased rollout that runs to the 2027 reporting year. The new taxonomy is explicitly designed to minimise excessive extensions, and that may prove the most consequential commitment of all for data quality and usability. Company-specific elements are the enemy of comparability, and the FSS’s ambition to build “AI-ready” disclosure data depends on keeping them in check.
Read the FSS announcement here (in Korean), or an English-language report from SBS News here.
