FSS to Provide Shareholders' Meeting Agenda Information via Open DART Starting Next Year

Summaries and detailed information on agenda items, including director appointments, compensation limits and dividends, to be provided

Starting with next year's regular shareholders' meetings, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) will provide not only summaries of agenda items but also detailed information on director appointments, approval of compensation limits, dividends and other matters through Open DART. The aim is to reduce the burden on institutional investors exercising their voting rights by enabling them to compare and analyze agenda items without having to review each company's meeting notice individually. The FSS will also break down notes to companies' financial statements by major item so users can extract only the information they need, and establish a foundation to support searches and analysis of disclosure information using artificial intelligence (AI).

On October 13, the FSS announced plans to improve Open DART and revise the XBRL financial disclosure taxonomy.

As a first step, the scope of information available on Open DART will be expanded to include disclosures related to shareholders' meetings. Open DART has so far provided key disclosure information, primarily from business reports and reports on material events. Going forward, users will also be able to easily search for and download information related to shareholders' meetings.

The FSS plans to provide basic information, including the date, time and location of each shareholders' meeting, the record date for voting rights, and whether the meeting will be held electronically and electronic voting will be offered. It will also classify all proposed agenda items by major and intermediate categories and provide an overview of each item. For major agenda items that attract strong investor interest and are frequently proposed, such as the appointment of directors and other executives, approval of compensation limits for directors and auditors, amendments to the articles of incorporation, approval of financial statements and dividends, the FSS will provide details to help users understand the specific proposals.

The move reflects concerns that institutional investors have difficulty thoroughly reviewing agenda items from multiple companies in the limited time available, as more than 95% of regular shareholders' meetings at listed companies are concentrated in mid-to-late March each year. The FSS expects Open DART to let users quickly check relevant information without having to review each original disclosure individually, reducing the time needed to examine agenda items. It also expects the service to help users manage meeting schedules and develop strategies for exercising voting rights.

The FSS will also improve the existing function on the DART website for searching notices convening shareholders' meetings. It plans to add a table of contents organized by agenda item to make specific proposals easier to find in notices, and to distinguish notices for regular and extraordinary shareholders' meetings in the disclosure list. In consultation with relevant ministries and organizations, including the Korea Exchange and the Korea Securities Depository, the FSS will complete system development and form revisions by the end of this year, with the aim of making the service available starting with the 2027 regular shareholders' meetings.

The FSS will also revise the XBRL taxonomy to increase the usefulness of financial disclosure data. XBRL is an international standard computer language for collecting and distributing corporate financial information as structured data that machines can easily read and analyze. Compared with disclosures in HTML or PDF, it makes it easier to obtain financial data and compare and analyze figures across companies.

The FSS will also more fully reflect the XBRL taxonomy of the IFRS Foundation to improve international consistency, while adding detailed elements suited to Korea's disclosure environment to raise the level of standardization. It will also review similar or duplicate items so investors can compare companies' financial disclosure data more accurately and consistently.

In particular, XBRL data from notes to financial statements, which has so far been provided either for individual companies or in large datasets covering all companies, will be divided into major note categories. This will make it easier to analyze specific items. The FSS plans to provide data from major notes, such as those on property, plant and equipment, sequentially through the Open DART application programming interface (API), allowing users to extract only the information they need and conduct in-depth analyses.

In line with the introduction of Korean International Financial Reporting Standards (K-IFRS) No. 1118, which revises the presentation and disclosure requirements for income statements, the FSS will release a new XBRL taxonomy this year and work toward providing data broken down by major note category during 2027. In the longer term, it will also build an environment for analyzing disclosure information using AI. The FSS plans to organize disclosure data from the stages of its creation and management into a format suitable for AI use, helping investors search and analyze disclosure information more easily.

An FSS official said, "We will continue to identify ways to improve disclosure forms to make disclosure, a means of communication between investors and companies, more effective and to ensure that the intent of policies to protect ordinary shareholders is fully reflected in corporate management and the disclosure process."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.