Since the 25th of January 2021, the FCA has started accepting electronic reports using the National Storage Mechanism (NSM). Since that change, seven companies have published reports in the XHTML format with inline XBRL markups. Amongst those seven reports, one was prepared by us for the company Novolipetsk Steel (NLMK).
First of all, I would like to show my gratitude to the team of our client NLMK, for whom this report has become their debut report alongside a vast number of other companies. Within the framework of effective cooperation, our team led by XBRL Director, Yuri Volkovich, together with the team from NLMK were able to successfully submit a tagged XHTML report to the NSM. We are very proud of the effort put in by both sides in achieving this task. We similarly see the functionality of the NSM system as a great success and as progress in the right direction.
At the same time however, our first submission to the NSM brought up several low-level issues which will require attention during the next reporting period. Unfortunately, the documentation for the NSM is not currently publicly available, this makes it more difficult to address such issues. We strongly hope that the results collected from this years’ reports and the accumulated NSM experience, will allow the FCA to not only continue developing the NSM, but to also publish comprehensive accompanying documentation. We further expect that the analysis of the pilot projects, alongside the feedback from market participants can allow ESMA to carry out a refinement of the ESEF taxonomy and their technical standards for a more effective tagging process for the 2021 financial year.
It should also be recognised that there are several discrepancies between the technical standards for the file set that gets submitted to the NSM and the core technical standards for ESEF. Ultimately, we hope for a harmonisation of these standards, however at the moment double-listed companies still have to adhere to two separate and differing sets of technical standards during report submission. However, thankfully these discrepancies do not create data compatibility issues.
We are currently collecting publicly available reports and based on the outcome of this reporting period, we will be looking to publish the results of our review. Stay tuned!
