Standard business reporting in Australia: Voluntary take-up issues facing users, preparers and regulators of company financial and business reports

The medium for processing and reporting corporate financial and businessinformation through the supply chain from the manager-preparer to governmentregulators and to external users has been evolving. In Australia, some majorregulatory agencies of federal and state governments recently went 'live' with a coordinatedon-line reporting facility called Standard Business Reporting (SBR), basedon XBRL taxonomies for electronic data exchange. The take up by businesses of thismedium compliance reporting of financial, tax and other business data to governmentregulators, is initially voluntarily. The objective of this paper is to assess SBR'sprospects of widespread adoption by businesses, users and regulators in Australia.An assessment is provided of the normative arguments in support and against theimplementation of XBRL from the viewpoints of corporate financial and businessinformation stakeholder users, management preparers and government regulators.The limited experienced with XBRL implementation in other countries is alsoconsidered. Despite the many benefits espoused for this medium, the conclusion isreached that businesses will be hesitant and slow in the voluntary take-up of this newSBR facility in Australia.