Question

What are the recent developments in corporate reporting practice

Answer 1

• Corporate provide documents/reports of their financial performance to public.Corporate reporting should provide relevant and useful information to investors and other stakeholders, as these reports are very cruciel.
• Corporate reporting changes and evolves in response to new legislation, requirements of regulators and changes in accounting standards, as well as various other demands from other stakeholder groups and new initiatives.

Some recent trends or develpoment are:

• MORE CONCISE FINANCIAL REPORTING: Recent years have seen financial reports of listed entities getting progressively longer and more complex.Paradox of this trend of more detailed financial reporting is that the longer the reports get, the less they tend to be read and understood.Hence there have been increasing calls for more concise financial reporting.Removing immaterial or insignificant disclosures in financial reports that may have built up over time.Re-ordering and grouping notes and accounting polices so that all the information reported about an item or area is reported together in one place.

• PERFORMANCE REPORTING FOR CHARITIES: The new Public Benefit Entity reporting standards issued by the External Reporting Board and now imposed by law on registered charities contain a rather radical new requirement: Performance reporting by charities.

• INTEGRATED REPORTING: An appreciation of the wider concept of sustainability, as well as developments in information and technology have led to recognition that the success of organisations is not just about the traditional measures of financial and manufacturing capital. Instead companies are increasingly required to consider a range of other very important externalities such as environmental, social, intellectual etc.