Celebrating a Decade of Progress with XBRL Italy
At the 22nd XBRL Europe event in Rome on 8 February the Chairman of XBRL Italy, Marco Conte, opened by discussing the impressive achievements made by XBRL Italy over the past ten years. Beginning from a difficult place post-financial crisis in a country with fabulous bureaucracy, XBRL Italy was founded with the aim of innovating and modernising the business community.
The past decade has seen multiple achievements, starting with the mandating of XBRL financial statements for all local GAAP non-listed companies in 2008, which brought reporting for more than 1 million firms into the digital era. As in many other countries, the collection of structured financial statement data provides a range of spinoff benefits. One very concrete demonstration of the value of this effort has been that it has allowed the Italian Revenue Agency to simplify corporate tax filing. Since then XBRL Italy have developed multiple taxonomies across banking, accounting and audit. XBRL Italy have progressed with structured data for non-financial reporting, with a project conducted with the Italian National Agency of Statistics (Istat) to produce both financial and non-financial statistics.
Following on from a busy decade XBRL Italy have a challenging and ambitious portfolio of projects coming up – including implementing ESEF, standardising the reporting of environmental data, automating bank loan assessments and XBRL for tax rebates.
XBRL Italy are a great example of how structured data and standardisation can be a modernising force, driven by collaboration and co-operation across industry and government. Congratulations to XBRL Italy and everyone involved for working hard and achieving so much progress!
