How the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency Will Make Use of XBRL

1. How the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency Will Make Use of XBRL By Michael Rugaard Programme Manager

2. The Danish Commerce and Companies Agency • Is an agency under The Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs • Administrates the law on • companies • accounts and • certain parts of business law • Receives annual accounts and company information from 120.000 businesses • Keeps registers of this information available to the general public

3. Business reporting today • All annual filings are: • received on paper • scanned • to a certain extent retyped into a structured form by third party vendors of financial information • The filings are frequently made by the company’s accountant, using: • Microsoft Office • Caseware • Local brand accountancy software (i.e.: “Focus IT”) • “Homemade” software • The companies often use ERP systems emanating from MBS Navision • (Axapta, Navision, Concorde, C5 etc)

4. DCCA and Digital Filing • DCCA has been working with digital filing since the 1990’s • Different Technologies applied since 1995 - without much success • EDIFACT • XML • Digital filing through XBRL starts – on a voluntary basis at the 3rd of January 2005 • Focus must be on user friendliness

5. Objectives for digital reporting • Increase the level of service provided to businesses • Enable faster and more cost-efficient regulatory control • Enable reuse of data across organizational boundaries (one-stop-Government) • Reduce reporting burdens and costs for businesses • Reduce costs and burdens related to consuming financial data

6. Why XBRL • XBRL could be the missing link in the supply chain • XBRL gives advantages to end users of data • and to filers as well as it becomes lingua franca

7. DCCA and XBRL • The DCCA has developed an XBRL-taxonomy (working draft) • The taxonomy will be expanded to cover the needs of other government institutions • The taxonomy can be used free of charge by anyone interested

8. The Flow Trial balance Business Accountant DCCA ERP System System for creating annual reports Management Report Mail/Browser A) Email containing: 1) Annual report 2) Digital Annual Report (XBRL) containing some of the facts and a PDF with all the facts B) Email containing: 1) Annual report 2) Digital Annual Report (XBRL)containing some of the facts and a PDF with all the facts Digital signature on report shown in browser

9. Making Data Available • The DCCA will provide financial (XBRL) data • Through our own user interface with limited functionality as well as • By selling data bulk to third party vendors • By providing general system-to-system user interfaces (web services)

10. The DCCA said all this a year and a half ago in Amsterdam – why has nothing happened…? • Well, it has, but: • We have been too ambitious • We have had to overcome too many technical problems • XBRL wasn’t as readily available in user software as expected

11. Too Ambitious… • We wanted the entire annual filing in a structured digital form! But: • Nobody is going to bother do all mapping that voluntarily • Nobody really needs all that • A taxonomy can’t really express all the quirks of Danish lawmaking in this field • It is neither technically nor practically feasible to ensure that an all-encompassing taxonomy is used correctly • We wanted to create correct presentations of data in the XBRL-filings in their entirety • …This was where we found out about what was technically feasible and what was not

12. Too many technical obstacles • Problems we brought onto ourselves • We did not work with Proof of Concepts for • The use of our taxonomy (its internal logic) • Support for XBRL in user-software • The possibility of making a style sheet that would work for any (Danish annual) XBRL-filing • It wasn’t until late in the process that we gained knowledge about the real life use scenarios for our taxonomy • XBRL-problems (relating to spec. 2.0a) • When we started out, our developers basically had to invent every single tool for themselves • Certain XBRL schemas didn’t parse correctly in major XML parsers • There seemed to be flaws in the spec’s

13. XBRL was (is?) not always so well implemented in user software • An important provider of accountancy-software had implemented one sub-set of XBRL • An important provider of ERP-software had implemented another sub-set of XBRL • We needed both subsets and then some • Lesson: It is important to see, that XBRL-enabled software supports at least the same core specifications of XBRL.

14. Our Approach • We encourage cross sectored support for XBRL • We do this on a number of levels and • With a number of actors • We share our experiences and results ---- • XBRL should follow the same lines of development as regular XML and be • Backwards compatible

15. So, what does the DCCA do now? • We are getting more user focused by • issuing a smaller taxonomy only containing data elements that are in high demand • and that emanate directly from ERP-systems for the most part • We do not upgrade to spec. 2.1 of XBRL • Until we have seen it work across software platforms • We do not try and make presentations of instance documents, but plan to live in a mixed environment (XBRL + PDF) for a while • We don’t do anything new in this field without POC • We keep supporting and evangelizing XBRL throughout the Administration • We will do pilot scale tests with large providers of annual filings • …and we hope to receive filings during 2005!