Digital Reporting and XBRL Multi Target Documents

Are These Reporting Frameworks Poor Design
or the Ultimate Flexible Framework?

The idea for this article began when the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) introduced the UKSEF XBRL reporting framework, which uses a rare approach to XBRL data collection. It uses a single inline XBRL document to collect data against multiple XBRL independent taxonomies. The UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) designed the UKSEF framework and has also since led a consultation on the future of UK company reporting taxonomies titled ‘the Opportunities for future UK digital reporting.’

My initial reaction was that I could not understand why any reporting framework would use such an approach. It seemed to me that rather than addressing the issues caused by combining data models described in several XBRL Taxonomies, the Multi Target Document (MTD) approach appears to push these issues down the information supply chain to be resolved by the report issuers and data analysts. In addition, UKSEF raises awkward decisions for software vendors of do they invest to support a unique MTD framework or not.

This MTD approach was also covered in a draft article by the XII Taxonomy Design Working Group (WG), part of XBRL International (XII) called ‘How to use a single Inline XBRL document for multiple reports.’ The WG paper is technically correct, as one would expect, however, my concern was broader than the technical details. The WG paper appeared to normalise the MTD approach, as it presents it as one of several equal approaches that a data collection authority could use when designing an XBRL taxonomy as opposed to addressing a rare and specific use case.

So, I wanted to understand more about why taxonomy designers would use this approach, what the real benefits to a reporting framework were, where the MTD approach should be used and where it shouldn’t. As I am not a taxonomy designer, I talked to a range of practitioners to get their views on the potential real-world use of the MTD approach.