Starting in the financial year 2022, there is a requirement to tag the notes to accounts of annual financial reports as per Guidance 1.3.3 updated in July 2021 by ESMA. This is usually referred to as the text block tagging rule.
In this short article, we will go over how to tag the text blocks of the notes to accounts in the financial report. There are many tags with “block-text” elements within the ESEF taxonomy and one needs to know exactly the list that should be considered to perform mandatory block tagging for reporting periods.
What Is Block Tagging?
ESMA requires all issuers submitting their AFS to tag complete financial reports with individual XBRL tags in addition to the financial statements. This means that each note to the accounts has to be mapped in accordance with the ESEF taxonomy with XBRL tags for all sections. These are minimum requirements set forth by ESMA, and each member country can set forth additional requirements as needed.
Block tagging has to be carried out on each and every section of Notes to accounts included within the annual financial report.
Text Block Tagging indicates capturing a group of information as one single fact, using one single tag from the taxonomy. Presently, the information given in Notes to Accounts which appears in many paragraphs will be tagged completely under the data type Text Block.
Why do we need to do text block Tagging?
To comply with the latest ESEF 2022 rules from the second year onwards, all filers are required to complete the text block tagging of notes to accounts in the iXBRL package before submitting it to the respective country’s regulator.
Navigating the ESEF Taxonomy for Block tagging:
ESEF IFRS Taxonomy provides a list of text block elements to tag the note’s disclosure.
Separate section Notes to accounts text block elements are presented under “List of Notes” as below:
For the text block tagging purpose, we will select the specific element available in the ESEF taxonomy and apply it on Notes to the accounts reported in the Annual report.
For example in an Annual Report, disclosure for the ‘Provisions’ reported under the notes to accounts section, we will tag the entire disclosure with the ESEF Taxonomy text block element ‘DisclosureOfProvisionsExplanatory’ as below:
