Denmark mandates XBRL for School Reporting
In Denmark almost 1200 schools are either privately owned or are public entities with extensive autonomy. From next March they will start to phase in compulsory financial reporting in XBRL format.
The schools range from privately owned elementary schools and high schools to independent boarding schools and vocational schools, with annual revenue ranging up to 100 million euros.
Currently, the Ministry assess performance based on annual, manually reported data – but following a successful XBRL pilot in 2019, XBRL reporting is being gradually expanded to all 1200 schools during 2021 and 2022.
To facilitate these disclosures the Ministry has developed a taxonomy, which is currently at public hearing stage. The end goal is full tagging of all the financial and non-financial data in schools’ annual reports, including associated audit reports. To assist auditors, schools and their vendors, most validations are pushed out into the taxonomy as XBRL calculations and formula. This means that most of the data quality checks can be carried out prior to submission, removing time consuming error review workflow between the filer and recipient agency.
The Ministry of Education has collaborated closely with the Danish Business Authority, who receive more than 300,000 annual reports in XBRL. The collaboration has allowed them to share a filing platform and XBRL architecture.
Congratulations to our colleagues in Denmark that have been driving this reform! Are you working on a new XBRL project? Let us know! news<at> xbrl.org is the address you want!
