The Expectation of Perceived Benefit of Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL): A Case in Malaysia

Abstract

The current research had explored the perceived benefits of adopting the advanced reporting technology program known as eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The current research is a continuous research on the awareness of XBRL in Malaysia that focuses on various stakeholders from a financial reporting perspective. This research is considered significant and important to Malaysia’s future development of reporting technology, which emphasizes on the expectation of perceived benefits, compatibility and perceived difficulty. The findings of this research have suggested that a few future adopters understand the positive impact of XBRL adoption by the organization pertaining to matters such as financial reporting, audits, users, corporation and compliance. Furthermore, few future adopters had perceived XBRL to be compatible with the current systems. In terms of complexity, a few of future adopters had agreed with the difficulty posed by XBRL adoption. The understanding of perceived benefits from a technological aspect can be improved if the regulators play their role by creating more awareness on XBRL adoption based on various success stories.

Exploring the Egyptian accountants' awareness and understanding of XBRL

“…Cohen et al (2005) and Henderson et al (2012) argued that XBRL will increase the quality of disclosed information by enhancing its timeliness and accuracy. Similarly, Vasarhelyi et al (2012) and Ilias et al (2015) declared that XBRL will increase both the comparability and consistency of accounting information over different periods and industries. Recently, the Certified Financial Accountants (CFA, 2016) survey found that XBRL tagged data will increase the reliability, consistency, and comparability for analyzing company's financial position and enhance the timeliness of the valuation process.…”

“…XBRL enhances the financial reporting cycle in an efficient and effective way. For example, Henderson et al (2012) point out that the organization can process the traditional manual transactions automatically and improve the communication between an organization and its auditors in a timely manner, which in turn lowers auditing fees, improves both continuous auditing and the performance of internal control (Eierle et al, 2014;Ilias et al, 2015;Fedorowicz, 2011). Likewise, XBRL prepares integrate the financial data between different platforms and software application from different organizations with the least amount of effort (Kim et al, 2012;Pinsker and Li, 2008;Troshani and Lymer, 2010).…”

“…Lastly, the lack of knowledage and interest in adopting the SG of online reporting in the emerging economies (Ahmed et al, 2017), and the absence of the obligatory adoption of XBRL in the stock exchanges' listing rules in most developing nations, including Egypt (e.g. Ahmed et al, 2017;Eni, 2015;Ilias et al, 2015). Thus, this study is purposefully explorative in nature and tests the Egyptian awareness and understanding of XBRL.…”

Enhancing Company Financial Transparency for Contractor Selection Process through XBRL: A Conceptual Framework

“…This situation has prompted accountants and related societies around the world to retrospect on the reporting standards. Studies like Ilias, Abd Razak, & Abd Razak, (2014) and Shanmuganathan, (2017) mentioned that, in the middle of this significant reform, Hoffman (2017), has introduced XBRL, an evolved version of extensible markup language (XML) technology which initial inception was to standardise websites developments (Mousa, 2016). As XBRL is hoped to fill the gap mentioned above, studies describe the features that can sufficiently explain the context of each information in FS.…”

“…Ever since the establishment of XBRL, the business communities and authorities around the world has shown great enthusiasm in adopting this technology to promote efficient information exchange between stakeholders (Ilias, Ghani, & Azhar, 2017). Similarly, in Malaysia, although the excitement was triggered as early as 2014 (Ilias et al, 2014), XBRL has only been adopted recently by SSM (New Straits Times, Sept 27, 2018). The move is expected to facilitate the statutory requirement for all companies to reveal its FS.…”