With many, particularly December year-ends, having recently filed their iXBRL submissions to HRMC and/or Irish Revenue, the question has arisen, can the ESEF tagged report be used for the required statutory submissions? Although both are iXBRL tagged (in most cases), the answer is no.
iXBRL is not a new concept to many companies in the UK and Ireland. It was first introduced in the UK back in 2009 and in Ireland in 2013. ESEF, on the other hand is a new concept and should not be perceived as the same as the existing iXBRL requirements. The first difference is those in scope of the ESEF mandate, which currently only applies to main market listed companies, whereas all companies who submit tax returns in the UK and Ireland, with some exceptions, are in scope for the statutory iXBRL requirement.
The tagging requirements for the statutory submissions and ESEF are also different. For statutory submissions, the full report needs to be tagged. For ESEF, the tagging for submissions in 2022, will only apply to the primary statements, and then to the notes for submissions in 2023. From this you may think that less work is required for an ESEF submission. You would be mistaken. For our current iXBRL filers, if there is no applicable tag available in a taxonomy then the item is left untagged. For an ESEF filing, we will tag everything stated in the primary statements. The means in the event there is no applicable tag available then we will create a tag (extend) and anchor that back to a tag or tags in the ESEF taxonomy.
ESEF reports will also be in the public domain, available on the regional OAM’s database and on the company’s website. This is not the case for the tagged reports submitted to HMRC/Irish Revenue. The ESEF tagged report will therefore be open to public scrutiny and the accuracy of the tagging will be vitally important. As the ESEF report will be publicly available, it will be crucial that the ESEF report will be a mirror to the human eye to the designed pdf, albeit in a different format (xHTML). For our existing iXBRL conversions, this is not the generally the case and having an identical format is not a requirement once the report is legible.
These are only some of the differences between the existing statutory tagging, which we’ve been familiar with for year, to the new ESEF requirement. If you want to find out more, please get in touch and join our LinkedIn Knowledge Base page.
| ESEF iXBRL | HMRC iXBRL | |
| Companies in scope | Main market listed companies in the EEA. | All businesses in the UK and Ireland who file tax returns. |
| Tagging requirements | All numbers in the primary statements must be tagged. If there is no corresponding tag for a line item in the taxonomy, then we must create a tag (extension) and anchor this back to the taxonomy. | It is mandatory to tag the full report. However, if the appropriate tag is not available, then the item is left untagged. |
| Turnaround time | 24 hours standard with 4 and 6 hour options available if required. | 15 business days with a 24-hour quick turnaround if required. |
| ARKK reviews | Multiple internal review processes due to public scrutiny of tagging. | One internal review. |
| Time for client review | One month to review the tagging analysis with the team. | 2 weeks to review the tagging with the team. |
| Format | xHTML report is a mirror to the human eye of the PDF. | No requirement for identical formatting. |
| Where to submit | ESEF reports wil be submitted to the NSM in the UK and Euronext Dublin for Irish listed companies. | Submitted to HMRC in the UK and Revenue in Ireland. |
