Last night, 2 of our Directors presented to an audience of 40+ tax professionals as guests of Lexis Nexis.  As iXBRL was the topic of this month's meeting, the first presentation of the evening was by Mark Holden and Stephen Banyard from HRMC where they gave the audience an overview of iXBRL, many of whom were hearing it for the first time.  Interesting speaking to Mark before hand that he feels that the message is getting through now, and his answers to the usual questions about the suspicion and cost of this initiative have taken on more credibility as a result of being in the field with early adopters. 
Some concerns which they are trying to head off include the acceptance within companies that this is a team effort for tax, accountants and IT departments together.   Another benefit that has emerged is a greater communication in companies that have multiple subsidiaries, the point being that they have to now talk to each other, or at least acknowledging that each other exist.

Questions from the audience were plenty and the theme that made the biggest impression was the need for accountants to make judgements about the tags that they use.  The best example of this came from a representitive of E&Y who recall the story from the SEC filings in the US where Microsoft mixed up contexts to post in XBRL values in millions instead of billions of $$$!  Joking apart, we know that the taxonomy is in plain English but there is still a point where a judgement call has to be made.  For on line iXBRL solutions that recommend the closest tag to the text and "semi-automate" the tagging, this doesn't help at all, instead it was deemed by the audience to proliferate the problem.  With the exception of our SME template offerings, we also found that the discussions that FTSE 350 companies have about which tag to choose can't be automated and that the up front analysis process is a crucial part of the implementation.

However those that are wondering how HMRC will validate whther the "correct" tags have been used can console themselves when, last night they admitted that for first time in their online history, they are "prepared to accept an imperfect return!"

Meeting report can be found at http://taxpg.org.uk/2010/03/19/report-of-the-march-meeting/#more-19