XBRL on the way for South Africa
The CIPC, the South African Companies and Intellectual Property Commission held a seminar this week to outline the Commission’s plans for introducing XBRL based reporting, initially for the 100 largest listed companies. The well attended breakfast seminar was part of a carefully planned programme for introducing structured reporting into the country. CIPC will announce the award of a software implementation contract on 1 April to facilitate the planned launch of the new system in early 2018.
The CIPC aims not only to improve efficiency, effectiveness and quality of financial reporting to the CIPC, but also to pave the way for other regulators in South Africa to adopt XBRL. The objective is to eventually share a common taxonomy and to enable information exchange amongst regulators. This will achieve major benefits for the South African economy as a whole, for instance by identifying both positive and negative trends for early warning purposes and to help investors make fully informed decisions.
