The first draft of the GRI G4 Taxonomy will be available for public comment on 9 September. GRI invites all organizations to review and test the draft taxonomy and provide feedback before 25 October 2013.
The GRI Taxonomy – which is available for free – was developed in collaboration with Deloitte Netherlands and launched in 2012. GRI and Deloitte are now continuing their collaboration to add the new G4 Guidelines to the Taxonomy.
XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. An open-source tagging language similar to XML, it is used worldwide for tagging data in financial reports.
By tagging the data once, organizations can gain better control over the quality and integrity of their sustainability performance data. This will help investors, auditors and other report users to access and compare GRI data more quickly and easily without the need for excessive manual work. Furthermore, while mistakes can be introduced when report users re-key data from printed reports, with XBRL there is no need to re-key data, so the risk of human error is eliminated. This results in re-used data being more reliable.
More reliable data helps organizations make smarter decisions, set and monitor sustainability targets and influence sustainability behavior within the organization and in connection with its suppliers.
The main benefits of XBRL include:
Greater reliability and consistency of information
Faster data collection, aggregation, and sorting analysis
Enhanced ability to customize reporting to meet the specific needs of information users such as investors and analysts
Compatibility with financial reporting systems and requirements
The draft G4 Taxonomy will be available for public comment from 9 September to 25 October 2013. During this time, reporters are invited to test and provide feedback on the taxonomy. The final version will be launched in November 2013.