Financial Reporting and Taxation: Cousins or Siblings?
When Christopher Cox, then chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was introducing the new XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) regime for financial reporting, he joked that he didn’t want to mention the XBRL term “taxonomy”, because people hate the word “tax”. Indeed, there is an obvious chasm between the worlds of financial statements and tax, and often between financial professionals and tax professionals.