Tagging scope for CIPC Mandate
It’s close to a year now since the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC), the Business Registry of South Africa has implemented and mandated companies to file their Annual Financial Statements (AFS) in the Inline XBRL (iXBRL) format. This is believed to be a game-changer decision for CIPC for making a positive move from receiving financial information in an unstructured format to a structured format. There are close to 100,000 qualifying companies in all over South Africa that have to comply with this new mandate.
Even though it’s been a while since this mandate kicked in; there still seems to be a lot of confusion across the market on how to comply with the mandate. Some companies and even service providers including audit firms are under an impression that qualifying companies only need to tag the financial statements and mandatory information, although this is not the only thing that the CIPC is expecting from companies to submit.
In fact, the CIPC has clearly defined on their website under the FAQs, the complete scope of tagging. The points that come under the complete scope of tagging are as follows:
1. Tagging of all applicable facts of the Primary Financial Statements (PFSs)
- Consolidated Statement of Financial Position
- Consolidated Income statement
- Consolidated Statement of Comprehensive Income
- Consolidated Statement of Changes in Equity
- Consolidated Cash Flow Statement
*Both consolidated and standalone financials need to be tagged.
2. Text Block tagging of disclosures/explanatory notes listed:
- Corporate Governance Report
- Directors Reports
- Directors Responsibility Statements
- Company Secretary Reports
- Independent Auditors / Reviewers Reports
- Accounting Policies
- Notes to Accounts
3. Even within text blocks, if there are concepts that are present in the taxonomy, they need to be tagged.
If we refer to the CIPC taxonomy, there are close to 4,000 elements and CIPC does encourage tagging every fact or relevant information that is in the AFS and matches the taxonomy. In the above tagging requirements, the CIPC has listed that 46 items need to be mandatorily required to be tagged before submitting the iXBRL document. Out of these 46 items, there are 15 items, which will require an explanation via a footnote in case you do not have anything to report for it. If by any chance company misses tagging any of the mandatory elements, the submission would be failed and will show as an error.
Since we are in the early days of the mandate, the CIPC may be under the analyzing process for the data submitted by the companies in the iXBRL format and may not penalize entities for incorrect filing. Once the process is more streamlined, the CIPC may be more stringent about the quality, accuracy, and completeness of the submitted data.
IRIS CARBON® offerings as a product and services
IRIS CARBON®– a global leader in Regulatory Compliance Reporting Solutions. IRIS CARBON® is a cloud-based, collaborative platform that helps filers globally meet regulatory mandates. The platform comes with a robust set of features and unlimited support for the preparation, review, and filing of iXBRL documents with the CIPC tagging.
With an experience of having worked in over 22 countries with over 300+ XBRL professionals including technical and operational, we are committed to providing high-quality data and have offered solutions and services around iXBRL as a standard since 2011. We know the mandate as no one else does.
