'Open DART' to Provide Shareholder Meeting Info at a Glance to Support Voting Rights

Information needed to analyze shareholder meeting agenda items will now be quickly searchable on "Open DART," a website dedicated to opening and analyzing disclosure information.

The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) announced on October 13 that it will push forward with upgrades to Open DART and the reorganization of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) taxonomy so that investors can easily analyze and utilize disclosure information.

The initiative is intended to support prompt and efficient agenda analysis regarding the exercise of voting rights at regular general meetings of shareholders by domestic and foreign institutional investors, while enhancing the usability of financial statement bodies and footnote information.

The FSS noted that there has been criticism that because regular shareholder meetings of listed companies are concentrated during specific periods, institutional investors face time constraints that make it difficult to thoroughly review meeting agendas and exercise their voting rights.

In response, the agency is pursuing plans to expand the Open DART service—which has been provided for major disclosure documents such as business reports and material fact reports—to also cover disclosure documents related to shareholders' meetings.

The Open DART service is a disclosure information-sharing service launched in April 2020 that helps users easily grasp key disclosure information without having to view each disclosure document individually.

Through Open DART, the FSS plans to provide basic information related to listed companies' shareholders' meetings as well as summary information for all agenda items submitted to the meetings. At the same time, it will provide detailed information to understand specific contents for major agenda items that draw high investor interest and a large number of submissions.

Users will easily be able to check everything from the date, time, and location of shareholder meetings to the record date for voting rights, whether electronic shareholder meetings are held, and whether electronic voting is implemented.

The FSS expects that this will allow institutional investors to quickly and in real-time check meeting-related information without having to individually read through notices of shareholder meetings, and utilize it for efficiently managing meeting schedules and establishing voting strategies.

These improvements aim to complete system development and form reorganizations within this year so they can be utilized at shareholder meetings next year.

In addition, ahead of the adoption of K-IFRS No. 1118 next year, the FSS will reorganize the XBRL taxonomy to enhance the convenience of comparing and analyzing financial disclosure data.

XBRL is a computer language that assigns internationally standardized codes to account items such as sales and operating profit to facilitate the creation, reporting, and analysis of corporate financial information.

Regarding the taxonomy reorganization, the FSS stated that while securing international consistency, it will also complement detailed elements reflecting South Korea's unique disclosure environment to raise standardization rates.

Furthermore, responding to criticisms that precise analysis focused on specific items has been inconvenient, the agency will improve the system to sequentially provide data by major footnotes—such as tangible assets—allowing users to extract only the information they want.

The new XBRL taxonomy is planned to be released within this year, with segmented provisions of data by major footnote scheduled for next year.

The FSS stated, "We will continue to make improvements so that necessary information is provided to disclosure information users in a timely and faithful manner and can be easily utilized for investment decisions, and we plan to build a foundation for the generation, management, and utilization of AI-ready disclosure data."

(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.