Can XBRL make a separate CSR/ESG report obsolete?

Presenter: Daniel Roberts

Companies provide a range of reports to various stakeholders. There are the statutory reports to regulators, press releases on any number of topics, and CSR type reports. Analysts was to review as wide a range of information as possible in attempting to come to some assessment of the value, short and long term, of a company. XBRL allows the tagging of information in the business report. Today that will mean the provision of mandated filings with various regulators. A fundamental assumption has been that the financial statements represents only up to 25% of the information needed to effectively value a company. What if this is not the case? Is it possible, through the mandated reports (the financial statements and the footnotes, and in the case of SEC reports the MD&A) to actually extract most of the information that would be used for CSR type analysis of a company - specifically the CSR related information that can be quantified? Today much of that information is provided, to a greater or lesser extent, in stand alone CSR reports. A previous study presented at the CERES conference in Boston in April 2006 indicated that CSR report, and specifically GRI indexed reports, were of limited value to the analyst community. The primary question then is: Does XBRL make a separate CSR report obsolete? In asking this question we will also provide the following: Can CSR information be extracted from existing reports if those reports are tagged? What CSR type information is missing? What are the implications for reporting companies, analysts, standards setters and regulators? We will use new DVFA KPIs as our "Analysts expectations" baseline, and will see if it is possible to extract that type of information from US GAAP tagged reports. We will also see if CSR can be tagged using the DVFA taxonomy (or extensions of that taxonomy as required). We will also attempt to tag the CSR reports using the US GAAP taxonomy, also looking for what extensions may be required to tag to the DVFA's requirements. We will then compare the ability to extract information from the reports for completeness, and determine what, and how much, information is missing.