Wider, Narrower: Anchoring in ESEF
As we have reported here before, from January 2020, under ESEF, all IFRS annual report face financial statements issued in the EU’s regulated markets will need to be marked up with Inline XBRL tags.
ESMA are using the ESEF taxonomy, an extension of the IFRS taxonomy. To accommodate non-standard disclosures, ESMA are allowing taxonomy extensions. However, these extensions must be anchored.
Since ESMA is the first regulator to require anchoring, Andromeda Wood, Senior Director of Data Modeling at Workiva, and the co-chair of the BPB’s Entity Specific Disclosure Taskforce presented a helpful tutorial to anchoring during Eurofiling last week. By requiring preparers to link the extensions they create to pre-existing elements in the taxonomy, ESEF hope to give more context to investors and data users, while still ensuring statements are as accurately tagged as possible.
Andie provided a number of helpful examples to explain the process. Anchoring comes down to the accounting meaning of the extension – with each extension element requiring anchoring either to the closest wider accounting meaning, (and in some cases the closest narrower accounting meaning). The exception is extensions that are a subtotal of other disclosures, which don’t need anchoring.
Her presentation takes you through a range of possible considerations when choosing what to anchor to, including some helpful examples of wider-narrower anchoring. The presentation deck is available here.
