Fujitsu Powers Government to Reduce Business Reporting Burden

Sydney, July 08, 2010

Fujitsu, a leading provider of business, information technology and communication solutions has today announced its further commitment to the Australian Treasury’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) Program to support the Government's strategy to reduce the regulatory reporting burden of Australian businesses, now that the SBR has gone live.

Fujitsu has supported the SBR program since its conception by providing Interstage XWand software to assist government agencies to develop taxonomies. It has also provided its rich APIs in Interstage XWand to the 12 government agencies involved in the project to enable them to receive and transform XBRL based reports from businesses throughout Australia.

XBRL, an international business reporting language, is the foundation of the Australian Governments’ Standard Business Reporting (SBR) program . Standard Business Reporting will simplify business-to-government reporting and save Australian businesses approximately $800 million annually when fully implemented.

"Businesses and reporting professionals using SBR-enabled software are now able to pre-fill and complete government forms directly from their own accounting system and lodge electronically to participating government agencies using the single secure sign-on AUSkey," SBR Program Director Paul Madden said.

A key issue in assisting accounting package vendors to adopt XBRL as their method for encoding of business reports (such as Business Activity Statements, Tax File Number Declarations and PAYG Declarations) is to provide them with an easy to use API which does not require these vendors to have a detailed understanding of XBRL.

“We realised from our experience in projects overseas that software developers do not necessarily want to become XBRL experts. Rather they want to be able to incorporate XBRL into their products in an easy way and focus on the key business related functions of their applications,” said Peter Campbell, Principal Architect in Fujitsu's XBRL team. “In conjunction with SBR, we developed an Application Programming Interface (API) which embedded (and hid) all the rules used in the SBR XBRL taxonomies allowing developers to XBRL enable their applications in the simplest possible way.” This API has now been made available for use by all commercial software vendors involved in the Australian SBR program.

As a leading XBRL software vendor and consultancy organisation, Fujitsu is heavily involved in XBRL global activities and our consultants from Australia play a leading role in supporting these initiatives.

On a global scale, Fujitsu has been working closely with leading international agencies including the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Japan's Financial Service Agency, and other regulatory bodies to develop their taxonomies and build their XBRL processing platforms. Fujitsu has also worked closely with various enterprises, government organisations, and central banks around the world, all of which have embraced XBRL and embedded Interstage XWand in their platforms.

Fujitsu is the largest vendor of XBRL software in Australia.