ESMA publishes guidance setting out the new European Single Electronic Format
19 Dec 2017
One of the requirements of the amended European Transparency Directive is that issuers listed on regulated markets in the EU must prepare their annual financial reports in a European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) from 1 January 2020. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has now published the final regulatory technical standards (RTS) on the ESEF together with some other helpful guidance.
To allow for structured electronic reporting using XBRL, ESEF uses an extension of the IFRS Taxonomy, issued by the IFRS Foundation. Where the annual financial report of an entity contains IFRS consolidated financial statements, these shall be labelled with XBRL tags which make the labelled disclosures structured and machine-readable. This allows for instance the analysis of large amounts of financial information without extensive and burdensome manual processing. Furthermore, as XBRL taxonomies can contain labels in several languages, users can compare numeric information in the financial statements across issuers even though the issuers prepare their financial statements in different languages.
Please click for the following items on the ESMA website:
- Press release
- Final report on the RTS on the European Single Electronic Format
- ESEF Reporting Manual
- Briefing note - Preparing for 2020: ESEF field tests and reporting manual
The publication of the RTS is accompanied by the launch of a new webpage on the ESEF.
