The European Single Electronic Format – An Overview
In December 2018, the European Commission approved the draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) for the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) as a Delegated Regulation. Although there is still some time for the European Council and the European Parliament to express any objections they have, this article highlights what the ESEF is, who it impacts, and when it is expected to come into effect, assuming its current form remains unchanged. What is the European Single Electronic Format? The ESEF refers to the electronic reporting format that should apply to issuers on EU regulated markets in respect of their annual financial reports. Some key features of the Final Report for the RTS related to the ESEF specify that:- Annual financial reports should be prepared in XHTML format;
- Annual financial reports that contain consolidated financial statements under IFRS should be labelled with XBRL tags. These tags should be embedded into the XHTML report using iXBRL;
- Initially, detailed markups should only be required for IFRS consolidated primary financial statements, meaning that the notes to the financial statements can be block tagged; and
- The core taxonomy that should be used is “an extension of the IFRS Taxonomy.”