The IFRS Foundation has published a proposed supplement to its 2011 taxonomy with more tags that would enable companies to describe some common financial statement disclosures. It's the first of two improvements to the taxonomy that the IFRS Foundation promised after the Securities and Exchange Commission determined the most recent IFRS taxonomy isn't robust enough to enable IFRS filers to use it for their 2011 XBRL submissions.

The IFRS release is an exposure draft of an interim release to the IFRS 2011 taxonomy focused on common-practice concepts. It would expand the number of IFRS tags to reflect disclosures that companies commonly make when reporting under IFRS. The idea, says the IFRS Foundation, is to reduce the number of company-specific extensions, or customized tags, that companies would need to produce to describe their disclosures. That should help make the information reported under IFRS more comparable when submitted to regulators through XBRL.

The Foundation promised in April it would develop such a release to expand the work it has already done in developing the 2011 IFRS taxonomy. It also promised to more closely examine footnote disclosures and see where it can develop more tags to reflect those common disclosures as well. The current exposure draft is open for review and comment through Aug. 2. After considering feedback, the Foundation plans to finalize the tags and consolidate them into a 2012 taxonomy for IFRS.

That won't help companies in the United States, however, that are facing a June 15, 2011, effective date to meet the SEC's requirement for submitting IFRS financial statements in XBRL. The SEC has already published a no-action letter saying it won't hold companies to the filing requirement if it doesn't approve an IFRS taxonomy, and it hasn't approved one yet.

IFRS filers are among the third group of public companies in the United States that are required to begin submitting financial statements through the data interactive XBRL system this year. The smallest public companies also are required to submit financial statements through XBRL this year, but they have an SEC-approved taxonomy for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that enables them to make the thousands of tag selections necessary to complete the filing. The largest public companies began filing through XBRL in 2009 and 2010.

The SEC hasn't said it will fully exempt IFRS filers from meeting the XBRL filing requirement in 2011, although the IFRS Foundation has said it is expecting such a deferral. Although the requirement takes effect in mid-2011, many IFRS filers submit only year-end financial statements, giving them potentially several months before they would have anything to submit to the SEC through any filing system.