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Deloitte Annual Report Insights 2018 - People

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Deloitte Annual Report Insights 2018 - People

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Only 6% provided diversity metrics regarding the employees.

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The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is seeking views on plans to take a more agile, flexible approach to corporate reporting, based on a principles-based framework, to ensure information better meets the needs of investors and others

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Should we accept that the pace of progress in the use of technology as a corporate reporting tool is likely to remain very slow, with no real impetus to change when investors already manipulate data using their own software and analyse data from a variety of sources? Or should stakeholders make a concerted effort to accelerate and co-ordinate progress, requiring a new depth and breadth of collaboration between technology specialists and those with an interest in better corporate reporting?

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Annual reporting more of a compliance exercise 

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Annual reporting more of a compliance exercise 

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- Hans Hoogervorst, IASB chairmen spoke about "reporting as a compliance exercise - valuable information gets drowned in 'tick box' disclosures"
- "Currently, the IFRS income statement is relatively form-free. We define Revenue, we define Profit or Loss, but not all that much in between" - suggests companies themselves are able to define, presenting possible issue of comparability between company's statements

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Only 34% of companies explained why diversity was important to overall strategy

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Only 34% of companies explained why diversity was important to overall strategy

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The needs of investors vs other stakeholder groups

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The needs of investors vs other stakeholder groups

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Need to be separated - more specific information

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Be clear on who their key stakeholders are and how they are balancing the interests of them

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•Additional costs if produce quarterly financial statements

•May result in too much focus on short term results and not long term success

-Institutional investors say they do not want quarterly reporting

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Length of Annual Reports Increasing Year on Year (See image below from 2012 to 2013)

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Length of Annual Reports Increasing Year on Year (See image below from 2012 to 2013)

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- Corporate Reports in regard to Annual Reports appear to be on the increase on a yearly basis, making it more complex for users to use a source of information.
- A counter measure adapted by FRC is 'Cutting Clutter', which emphasises the need to remove any non material or irrelevent information, and that at present Corporate Reports aren't meeting the needs of it's users.

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Several Specific Issues with Annual Reports

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Several Specific Issues with Annual Reports

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- This further explains the lack of useful content within Annual Reports with the two examples shown below, showing to be more descriptive than analysis based, which doesn't help the users of the reports.
- There is a significant amount of sections highlighted below which could be adapted by companies to reduce the complexity of their reports.
- These sections compromise of; moving a lot of the 'unneeded' sections to a website and just reference them, straight up deleting information that is no longer relevent (such as the financial crisis), and the reduction in the repetition of language from accounting standards.
-The more significant improvements/changes to Annual Reports are to implement cross-referencing and signposting (this would improve the usability of the report and ease navigation. With the increase on the focus of sustianable reporting, this could be implemented/talked about more as this is a key topic at present.

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The change process for corporate rpeorting improvement

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The change process for corporate rpeorting improvement

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Some companies see the IFRC requirements to just be a 'box ticking' exercise, and don't really take it seriously, their aim to just meet these codes and guidance to not get any backlash from these governing bodies. With such a focus on this, it could be drawing the much needed attention away from other aspects and so this change process has been developed to try and improve the way Annual Reports are to be done.
plan > manage > do > evaluate > plan ... etc

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- Institutional investors care more for assurance from discussions with boards that from the narrative within the annual report
- JB Holland 1998 - reports often use analyst predictions and avoid surprise earnings announcements. This puts into question the usefulness and accuracy of the information
- report focuses too much on past data and offers little information of value for the future of a business
- For users that are unfamiliar with accounting practices and standards, the reports may be too complex to gain value from. XBRL could be useful to make the reports more understandable for different users.