Australia calls time on financial reporting’s paper trail?
Australia’s Productivity Commission has issued a wake-up call: it’s time to leave PDFs behind. In its final report on Harnessing Data and Digital Technology, released late last year, the Commission recommends making iXBRL based digital financial reporting mandatory for disclosing entities.
The case is hard to ignore. Despite a voluntary framework being in place since 2010, not a single Australian company has submitted a digital financial report. Meanwhile, other jurisdictions have long since moved on. The United Kingdom, United States, European Union, Japan, Korea and others all require structured digital filings using XBRL or iXBRL. Australia is now one of the last high-income countries where public companies still submit financials in hard copy or PDF format.
The Commission’s analysis shows that this is holding the country back. Non-digital reports are difficult to analyse, expensive to process, and delay key insights. That matters not just for investors and analysts, but also for regulators, auditors, researchers and public policy. The report points to tangible benefits of digital reporting, including faster data access, higher accuracy, lower processing costs and improved visibility for Australian firms in global capital markets. Deloitte Access Economics estimates that a mandate could add $7.7 billion to Australia’s GDP annually after five years.
While transition costs and training are real concerns, international experience shows that these fall sharply after the first reporting cycle. A large Australian firm’s initial tagging effort might take a few person-days, but the Commission notes this is less than one percent of total reporting effort. Digital reports don’t change what is reported, only how it’s delivered. And frankly, when auditors and analysts are spending time copy-pasting numbers out of PDFs, something has gone wrong.
On a technical level, the recommendation is for iXBRL format reporting, aligned with the existing IFRS Australia taxonomy. It recommends open access to reports through a central portal, updated validation tools, and quality assurance mechanisms including tagging guidance and error checking. Critically, it also proposes measures to support a successful rollout, including sufficient lead times, stakeholder consultation and user training.
The report also takes a look at AI’s productivity potential, outlining that AI can enhance reporting analysis, but it is not a substitute for structured digital data. The report explains that without the underlying structure of a financial taxonomy, even the best large language models (LLMs) struggle. When extracting financial items from unstructured PDFs, LLMs mapped to the correct taxonomy element less than 20% of the time. Structured data, on the other hand, provides the clarity needed to support reliable, scalable AI tools. This is a crucial insight. The power of AI in financial reporting depends on the quality and structure of the data it consumes.
The report’s recommendations are sensible and well-calibrated. The initial mandate would apply to disclosing entities under the Corporations Act 2001, including publicly listed companies and other public interest entities. ASIC and stock market operators would manage implementation, and the requirement to submit reports in hard copy or PDF would be scrapped. In other words, digital would become the default, not the exception.
While this is, at this stage, merely a recommendation, it’s also a clear signal to government: Australia’s reporting infrastructure is out of date. Voluntary regimes haven’t worked. And the economic, regulatory and analytical benefits of digital financial reporting are now too large to ignore.
You can read the full report on the Productivity Commission’s website.
