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Straight through reporting with XBRL in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The UK Inland Revenue has closely examined the business case for electronic filing, and rather than taking a paper form-based process and moving it as-is to electronic form, they have looked at the broader context of what's good for filers, vendors, tax administrators, and others. Through the Inland Revenue XBRL Working Group, the Inland Revenue has made a substantial commitment to using XBRL (the Extensible Business Reporting Language) as a component of Corporate Tax filings. XBRL will be used because in the UK, the bulk of a corporate tax filing is taken up with statutory accounts and what is called the 'computation', i.e., the derivation that starts with the statutory accounts and includes adjustments, calculations, depreciation calculations, etc. This information is reusable across many other financial reporting functions, making XBRL an ideal medium for its encoding. The Inland Revenue and tax software vendors in the UK are committing to a timeline for adopting XBRL filings so as to avoid an indefinite period in which 'electronic filing' of data is left in relatively opaque, image oriented file formats.

Keywords

»Tax, »XBRL.

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Biography

Walter Hamscher is the co-author of the first XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) specification currently is Chair of the Steering Committee of XBRL International. He is the founder of Standard Advantage, a consultancy based in Boston, Massachusetts that helps companies to take advantage of strategic commitments to open standards, particuarly XML based e-commerce standards. He was previously the CTO of Beachfire Inc. and was Director of global research and development at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He earned hsis Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.