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(Tuesday 16 April 2013) – ACORD and XBRL International, in collaboration with BR-AG (Business Reporting Advisory Group), today released a discussion paper examining touchpoints between the XBRL Solvency II taxonomy and ACORD's Global Reinsurance and Large Commericial (GRLC) standards. The paper's release was announced jointly by BR-AG's CEO Michal Piechocki and ACORD's Chief Industry and Government Affairs Officer, Ann Henstrand during the 26th XBRL International Conference in Dublin, Ireland.

The discussion paper explores the notion that there is a common subset of data between the two sets of standards which can be mapped to achieve efficiency, consistency, and reliability.  The ACORD GRLC standards and the XBRL Solvency II taxonomy are the initial focus for interoperability opportunities between the standards, given the advent of Solvency II regulatory reporting requirements for insurers in EU member states.

"ACORD believes that collaboration between data organizations is important. Working together, we can more quickly build data roadmaps for consistent use in all insurer operations systems. This paper is an important marker toward the goal of more accurate and efficient communication and data exchange," said Gregory A. Maciag, President and CEO, ACORD.

"The broad acceptance of XBRL proves that the need for efficient sharing of business information is not confined to any one industry or reporting requirement. With this detailed exploration of how two standards can complement each other, we are opening up new possibilities for both XII and ACORD. We look forward to working closely with the insurance industry to uncover more we can do together," said Tony Fragnito, CEO of XBRL International.

Michal Piechocki, CEO of BR-AG, of Poznan, Poland, who co-authored the paper with ACORD's Puneet Bharal, said, "The utility and reliability of XBRL data will be enhanced by working with existing vertical industry standards, such as ACORD for insurance.   BR-AG is pleased to contribute to this proof-of-concept work, and looks forward to more extensive community discussions and possible development of real-life business use cases."

XBRL is a well-established and growing global standard for the sharing of business information in sectors such as securities regulation, taxation, banking, insurance and non-financial areas like carbon disclosure and risk reporting , while ACORD is a well-established and growing global standard primarily used for insurance industry transactions in all insurer sectors.  ACORD standards also contain an insurance industry framework made up of five inter-related facets including a business glossary, data model, component model, capability model and information model.  These ACORD insurance industry models are identified in the discussion paper as the means by which a unifying data dictionary encompassing both standards could be created to support future mappings for consistency and ease.

Next steps identified by the two organizations include the formation of a joint working group with representation from the XBRL regulatory, accounting and financial reporting communities, along with  IT, data architecture, and insurance business community members from ACORD. The group will further explore efficiencies which may be achievable in other parts of the world, and using the full scope of ACORD's standards including general insurance, life and annuities, and more.

For a copy of the discussion paper, please see: http://xbrl.org/sites/xbrl.org/files/imce/xii_acord_brag_discussionpaper.pdf. To indicate interest in participating in the joint XBRL-ACORD Working Group, please contact:  Puneet Bharal, Director of Implementation Services, pbharal@acord.org.

Brazil's National Treasury Secretariat hiring an individual consultant to assist NTS staff on the creation of GL and FR layers of XBRL Taxonomy and on the definition of processes for the maintenance, versioning and migration to new releases of the aforementioned taxonomy for the Brazilian Public Sector Accounting and Fiscal Information System – SICONFI. Reply by 8 April.

Download the RFP
 

(5 March 2013) -- S4S Conversion of the XBRL 2.1 Specification approved to Recommendation

XBRL International is pleased to announce that the XBRL Standards Board, at the request of the XBRL Base Spec Working Group, has approved as RECOMMENDATION this 2013-02-20 edition of the XBRL 2.1 specification.  This edition incorporates no new errata, but has been reformatted in HTML for readability and accessibility.

The conversion of the XBRL Specification v2.1 from its old format was a substantial amount of work which will now allow future errata releases to be produced quickly and consistently. The use of HTML for the normative text brings this core specification into line with more recent publications from XBRL International.

This work was contributed to the XBRL community by staff at CoreFiling, as part of their ongoing contributions to the XBRL suite of standards.  CoreFiling considers this contribution to be valuable particularly for use in the evolving European regulatory environment.

The HTML version of the 2.1 Spec can be found on the xbrl.org website on the Recommendations page, or directly at the following location:  http://xbrl.org/Specification/XBRL-2.1/REC-2003-12-31/XBRL-2.1-REC-2003-12-31+corrected-errata-2013-02-20.html.