The Financial Accounting Standards Board has published its annual proposed update to the U.S. GAAP Taxonomy.

The proposed 2013 taxonomy contains updates for accounting standards and other suggested improvements that FASB has learned about over the past year. It's an annual maintenance exercise for the taxonomy to assure it remains current to facilitate compliance with XBRL reporting requirements, which now apply to all public companies. In addition to the proposed taxonomy itself, FASB also has provided a summary of the major changes it has made. They include: the removal of references that have been superseded by the Accounting Standards Codification and the removal of non-GAAP references that are no longer maintained, and a remodeling of the segment disclosure area and areas specific to the insurance profession, plus a remodeling of disclosures for unrecognized deferred taxes. The new taxonomy also features a remodeling of the disclosures of other operating income and expense to eliminate redundancies, FASB says.

The taxonomy is a list of computer-readable tags or labels, coded in XBRL, that link to specific elements in GAAP financial statements. Preparers refer to the taxonomy to select the appropriate tags to explain each element in their financial statements to submit them to the Securities and Exchange Commission formatted in XBRL. The largest public companies have been reporting in XBRL since 2009 but the requirement became effective for the smallest companies in 2011. XBRL enables users of financial statements to search, sort, and analyze data faster and easier than ever before.

FASB is accepting comments on the 2013 GAAP Taxonomy through Oct. 29. FASB will revise it and submit it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, where it must be approved before it can be relied on for submitting financial statements. FASB expects the final taxonomy to be available in early 2013.