International Federation of Accountants

1. International Federation of Accountants Assurance for Digital Reporting • James M. Sylph • Executive Director, Professional Standards, IFAC • World Congress of Accountants, Istanbul – November 15, 2006

2. XBRL – From Concept to Generally Accepted Standard • XBRL’s goal is to satisfy the diverse and critical needs of many stakeholders to increase transparency in the marketplace • Activity to date has been mostly with regulators • Companies, investors and lenders are likely to be users and consumers of XBRL information in the future • Widespread adoption of XBRL must continue to pass various technical, regulatory and administrative milestones

3. Current State of Financial Reporting Process • Statutory and regulatory requirements dictate the applicable financial reporting framework that drives the form and content of audited financial statements and un-audited interim financial information • Traditional financial statements are converted to XBRL format and made available to users • Assurance is provided on the audited financial statements

4. Future State of Financial Reporting Process • In the short to medium term, it is reasonable to expect that: • Information in XBRL format, whether filed on a mandatory or voluntary basis, will be in addition to the existing information • Any assurance required on the XBRL information will: • Be in response to mandatory regulatory requirements • Cover the ‘conversion’ of the financial information in • its traditional form into XBRL format

5. Example ASSURANCE Accurate and appropriate Tags have been used The instance document includes the same information as the human readable version XBRL Data in a source document or in data files is tagged and represented independently, without loosing context, within an instance document

6. Example XBRL Tagged data is mapped to the taxonomy ASSURANCE The appropriate taxonomy has been used and has been properly applied

7. Example ASSURANCE The XBRL file is able to be ‘electronically consumed’ because it complies with XBRL technical specifications XBRL XBRL instance documents are a collection of data and explanatory tags, optimized to be read by computers, not humans

8. Future State of Financial Reporting Process • If and when XBRL becomes the generally accepted standard, regulators will need to mandate changes to the traditional financial reporting model and mandate the required assurance • Other users will define their needs for timely information over and above the financial statements and whether they require assurance on that information

9. IAASB – Call for Action • Close monitoring of XBRL developments • Liaison with XBRL community • Dialogue with regulators • Clearly define the user needs for assurance services in • order to develop standards that will respond to those • needs

10. IAASB – Future Agenda • Next 18 months full agenda • Wide consultation through 2007 on future agenda • Include focus groups and public exposure • Will consider competing priorities for 2008 onwards