ESEF Taxonomy Upgrade
The continuous update on IFRS taxonomy based on the issuer’s requirement has released multiple taxonomies. ESMA submitted the 2022 draft update to the ESEF regulation in June 2022, which was adopted by the European Commission on 21 September 2022 and passed in European Parliament and Council on 21 December 2022 with no objection and made available on 22nd December 2022. The IFRS also published a versioning document explaining the changes as compared to the previous taxonomy. ESMA released an updated version of ESMA taxonomy 2022 based on IFRS 2022 taxonomy.
On 30 December 2022, the fifth version of the European Commission’s Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/2553 was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. This Regulation amends the previous version of Regulation (EU) 2022/352 of 29 November 2021. This latest update of the ESEF Regulation adopts the new version of the ESEF 2022 Taxonomy to be used for ESEF filing.
The ESEF 2022 Taxonomy will be applicable for financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2023. However, issuers are allowed to adopt the ESEF 2022 Taxonomy on a voluntary basis for the 2022 annual report.
The IFRS Accounting Taxonomy 2022 includes changes to the IFRS Taxonomy 2021 resulting from amendments related to:
- Disclosure of Accounting Policies, which amended IAS 1 Presentation of Financial Statements and IFRS Practice Statement 2 Making Materiality Judgments, issued by the IASB in February 2021;
- Definition of Accounting Estimates, which amended IAS 8 Accounting Policies, Changes in Accounting Estimates and Errors, issued by the IASB in February 2021;
- Initial Application of IFRS 17 and IFRS 9―Comparative Information, which amended IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts, issued by the IASB in December 2021.
The amendment has resulted in introducing a new disclosure as “[800610] Notes – List of material accounting policy information” which is due to the reason:
- An entity is now required to disclose its material accounting policy information instead of its significant accounting policies;
- The amendment makes it clear that accounting policy information may be material because of its nature, even if the related amounts are immaterial.
- Definition of Accounting estimates to make a distinction between how an entity should present and disclose different types of accounting changes in its financial statements.
Amendment to IFRS 17 was amended to allow companies to improve the usefulness of comparative information presented in the Initial Application of IFRS 17 and IFRS 9
Disclosures with the Addition of new IFRS elements
These amendments have impacted the taxonomy and resulted in adding additional elements to the different link roles in the 2022 ESEF Taxonomy
| S. No | Name of Disclosure | New concept added |
| 1. | [610000] Statement of changes in equity | IFRS 9 [member] |
| 2. | [800500] Notes – List of notes | Disclosure of material accounting policy information [text block] |
| 3. | [811000] Notes – Accounting policies, changes in accounting estimates, and errors | Disclosure of Accounting Policies [member] |
| 4. | [822390] Notes – Financial instruments | Explanation of measurement bases for financial instruments used in preparing financial statements [text block] |
| 5. | [836600] Notes – Insurance contracts (IFRS 17) | Disclosure of qualitative information about the application of classification overlay and impairment requirements [text block] |
Key Considerations for ESEF 2022 Taxonomy and Conformance Suite Guidelines
- As per the latest ESEF 2022 Taxonomy the line item “ifrs-full: DisclosureOfNotesAndOtherExplanatoryInformationExplanatory” is not required to be tagged in the iXBRL document.
- Every issuer has to comply with the block-tagging requirements as per the latest ESEF Reporting Manual. Every software vendor should be able to handle a granular level of tagging in the iXBRL document.
- Issuers should follow the technical construction of block tagging to ensure a better resemblance of tagged facts with the human-readable report. Issuers should also ensure that text and table content should be displayed in the same order and sequence as per the human-readable report.
- Warnings related to mandatory markup have been removed from the latest ESEF 2022 Taxonomy.
Conclusion
ESMA in December 2022 published the ESEF 2022 Taxonomy and an update to the ESEF conformance suite based on the 2022 IFRS Taxonomy. However, issuers may voluntarily choose which taxonomy to use, 2021 or 2022, depending on the readiness, and make sure it is validated as per the required conformance suite guidelines.
