XBRL filing in Italy: the mandatory deposit of annual financial statements

1
XBRL filing in Italy the mandatory deposit of
annual financial statements

• Paola Fumiani
• XBRL technical advisor at InfoCamere
• member of "Associazione XBRL Italia"

2
The filing of annual financial statements

• Is a mandatory provision for limited liability
  companies
• Done by the Italian Business Register (Registro
  Imprese Italiane)
• The Register is held by the Chamber of Commerce
  network, on a territorial basis
• about 6.000.000 of Businesses are registered as
  per today
• processes financial Statements from about 850.000
  companies per year
• It relies on
• UnionCamere, the Union of the 103 Italian
  Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Handicraft
• InfoCamere, the technology provider
• Hosting of the Italian Business Register
• Storing data on the relevant companys events
  establishment, variations, winding-up,
  cancellation.

3
2008 XBRL mandatory filing format

• The law requirements
• The Italian government pushes for the adoption of
  a standard by approving the law decree (n. 223
  of July 2006) providing for the "mandatory
  deposit of annual financial statements related to
  the year 2007 via electronic support and with a
  processable format".
• It will be the mandatory standard from 2008
• The required processable format is in fact XBRL
• Commitment for the Italian Business Register
• No extra investments by the Business Entities
  while supplying their XBRL Annual Accounts

4
Implementing xbrl filing the roadmap

• The 2007 proof of concepts
• environment set up (web sites, tutorial,
  training, tools)
• filing limited to PFS (Primary Financial
  Statements)
• Activation of the pilot 2007 (voluntary filing)
• running from May2007 ("Annual Accounts" filing
  campaign )
• All 103 Chambers of Commerce involved
• 80 volunteer users software providers and
  professional accountants
• 905 instance documents filed

5
Environment set up

• Publishing on the free access web site of
• the GAAP Italy Taxonomy
• an introduction to XBRL Technical
  Specifications
• the XBRL filing guidelines and tools tutorials
• Running training sessions on the XBRL standard
• Activating a rendering and validation tool for
  XBRL instances on the InfoCamere public website

6
Environment set up

• .. for the users work station a downloadable
  package based on MS Office/Open Office,
  generating XBRL instances by
• Data entry on a specific application form
• Automatic import in the application form of the
  financial facts directly from the accounting
  management software using customized mapping
  tables

7
The outcomes of 2007 Proof of Concept for XBRL
instance documents

• Received 905 correct XBRL instance documents, 80
  with error messages all detected by the
  validation service
• XBRL related errors
• Calculation errors missing data in the sub
  total fields
• invalid mappings between taxonomy elements and
  the accounting process
• "abstract" items filled with values
• XML related errors
• incorrect usage of data types (numeric/alphanumeri
  c)
• Special characters used in the company name
  element ( typically '' )
• usage of delimiters in numeric items ( i.e.
  1,000 )
• usage of decimal digits (i.e. 2459,00 while
  the Italian Code provisions states that values
  must always be integers )
• XML validation errors not well-formed files

8
The outcomes of 2007 Proof of Conceptfor the
GAAP Italian Taxonomy

• Taxonomy design
• Concepts definition is governed and verified
  against the civil code provisions.
• Elements of the taxonomy have to describe the
  financial concepts consisting of elements and an
  un-limited number of nested sub-elements....
• common practice is
• Most companies are able to draw up their
  financial reports using the Italian GAAP
  taxonomy
• while exceptions are
• some companies want to deeply detail their
  financial facts no limits on detailing are
  imposed by the civil code
• How can a financial report with un-limited
  details be translated in an XBRL document,
  referring a mandatory taxonomy schema?

9
The Jurisdition's discussion

• Technical strategies/alternatives
• allowing companies to define their own taxonomy
  extensions
• the consequence is a loss of standardization and
  interoperability.
• Adopting a maintenance program to update the
  existing taxonomy on demand and managed by the
  Xbrl jurisdiction
• increased work for the taxonomy management
  (definition of acceptance criteria, editing,
  testing etc)
• Organizational solution
• Companies needing extra facts definitions are
  allowed to add the PDF Annual account to the XBRL
  instance document

10
Mandatory "XBRL" - Optional "PDF" annex

• The filing process changes slightly according to
  the pilot 2007 steps
• Download the software for e-filing of the Annual
  Financial Statements dossier from the central
  server
• Dossier production
• XBRL mandatory PDF optional
• Dossier components signature
• Dossier filing to the central server

11
Financial reports in the Italian Business
Register different format for the same
information
Business Register (Registro Imprese Italiane)
XBRL
financial information to be consumed directly by
software applications
Deeply detailed PDF financial report
PDF
12
E-filing to the Italian Business Registrer

• Digital signature adoption
• Over 2,000,000 digital certificates distributed
  to SMEs throughout Italy

13
Information handling through XBRL

• Benefits coming from XBRL are well known
• selection of key figures using a query language
• multilanguage features on viewing and reporting
• merging data from different Data Bases

14
The link to XBRL exploitation Brite case

• XBRL is becoming a strategic data format
• XBRL has been adopted by some research projects
• Brite Business Registers Interoperability
  across Europe
• LINK to Brite Service Case 3 presentation
• "exposing financial data through xbrl"