ESMA Publishes Taxonomy for Implementation of ESEF Regulation

The ESEF technical standard requires that, starting from 2020, all listed issuers publishing AFRs under the meaning of the Transparency Directive prepare their AFRs in the xHTML format. Whenever AFRs contain IFRS consolidated financial statements, issuers shall mark them up using XBRL tags chosen from a taxonomy of accounting concepts and embed them in the underlying xHTML document using the inline XBRL technology. This will combine the XBRL benefits of tagged data with the human-readable presentation of an AFR.

The ESEF taxonomy is based on the IFRS Taxonomy, which the the IFRS Foundation prepares and updates annually, and provides issuers with a hierarchical structure to be used to classify financial information. The taxonomy comprises a set of electronic files that provide a structured representation of the elements that substantively constitute the core taxonomy. These can be accessed on the website of ESMA in the form of a taxonomy package (in accordance with the XBRL Taxonomy Packages 1.0 specification). The package includes entry points in all EU languages. The human-readable labels of the core ESEF taxonomy, which list and define the elements that preparers can use to identify (tag) the information disclosed within IFRS consolidated financial statements, have been included in Annex VI of the technical standard on ESEF.

Related Links

• Press Release
• ESEF Taxonomy
• Technical Standards on ESEF (PDF)

Keywords: Europe, EU, Banking, Insurance, Securities, Taxonomy, Reporting, ESEF, XBRL, IFRS Taxonomy, ESMA