It's not official yet, but the 2012 U.S. GAAP taxonomy is available for viewing reflecting changes that occurred as a result of the draft and comment process. It will be official when it is given final acceptance by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and there's no exact timeline for when that will occur.

Also available for viewing, the IFRS Foundation has published a draft 2012 IFRS Taxonomy to consolidate interim taxonomy releases published last year with changes to reflect new international accounting standards. It is open for comment through March 17.

The GAAP taxonomy was first published by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in draft form in the fall of 2011 to give users time to study it and provide feedback before it would be final. FASB collected comments through October and tweaked the draft to produce the final version that now awaits SEC approval. The revised-but-unapproved taxonomy is available to give filers, service providers, software vendors, and anyone else who is interested an opportunity to get familiar with the taxonomy before tagging gets under way.

The taxonomy is a list of computer-readable tags in eXtensible Business Reporting Language that allows companies to tag individual pieces of data in a typical financial statement as well as the related footnote disclosures. The tagging process allow computers to automatically search for, assemble, and process data so it can be readily accessed and analyzed by investors, analysts, journalists, and regulators. The 2012 Taxonomy reflects accounting standards that will be in effect in 2012, so it is not intended to be used for filing financial statements in XBRL before the start of the first quarter of 2012.

“The taxonomy is available for comment throughout the year but ‘formally' declared for public comment for 60 days starting around September 1 of each year,” says FASB spokesman John Pappas. “We receive hundreds of comments from the public, industry groups, SEC, XBRL US, and other interested parties.” Comments generally focused on suggest new elements, definition changes, and other technical corrections, he says.

For IFRS, the taxonomy has developed a little more slowly as the IFRS Foundation has pursued improvements called for by the SEC. Although foreign private issuers filing IFRS financial statements in the United States are required to file using XBRL, the SEC has not enforced the requirement because it has not yet accepted an IFRS taxonomy.

The SEC has tasked the IFRS Foundation with producing a more robust taxonomy that would drill more deeply into financial statement details. It wants to minimize the tendency seen in early GAAP filings for companies to create custom tags, or “extensions,” when they can't find tags specific enough to describe their data.

The IFRS Foundation answered that demand with interim releases throughout 2011 to supplement its 2011 IFRS Taxonomy, but so far the SEC has not approved an IFRS taxonomy for use in SEC filings.