EU sustainability reporting shake-up arrives — without impacting digital reporting
The European Commission has unveiled its Omnibus simplification proposals to scale back and delay sustainability reporting requirements under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and related rules.
While the changes shrink the number of companies required to report and push back deadlines, they leave digital reporting requirements untouched—meaning that when companies do report (and once ESMA has finalised its RTS), they’ll be using ESEF, Inline XBRL, and XHTML.
Despite the proposed revisions, the fundamental digital reporting requirements remain in place. The CSRD’s existing mandate for sustainability disclosures to be prepared in XHTML and digitally tagged in Inline XBRL is not affected. This means that companies still need to structure their reports in Inline XBRL — a human and machine-readable format — ensuring transparency, comparability, and accessibility for regulators, investors, and AI-driven analysis.
However, tagging will not be required until the Commission adopts a delegated RTS or Regulatory Technical Standard, to be prepared by ESMA, establishing the digital taxonomy for sustainability reporting. Until that happens, companies are not required to apply digital tags to their sustainability statements. Once the taxonomy is in place, sustainability disclosures will become fully machine-readable, supporting automated analysis and AI-driven insights.
The Commission has also reiterated that structured data will facilitate AI-driven analysis—a reminder that robust, machine-readable reporting is central to the future of financial and sustainability disclosures. Inline XBRL enables accurate, automated comparisons across companies and industries, improving decision-making for all. It provides a single version of digital truth, that management is accountable for.
In our view, without machine-readable standardised disclosures, sustainability reporting would be little more than a compliance exercise—difficult to compare, analyse, or enforce. Inline XBRL ensures that CSRD disclosures are not just published, but actually usable—by investors, regulators, and AI-driven tools that will shape the future of financial analysis. In short, without structured data, CSRD would not be fit for purpose.
For more details, read the Commission’s full proposals.
