Open Response to PwC and the UK Financial Reporting Council

David Philips, whose Corporate Reporting Group at PriceWaterhouseCoopers has stuck with the challenges of reporting year in and year out, just posted about a new report from the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) called Louder than Words: Principles and actions for making corporate reports less complex and more relevant. In support of the report, PwC has written a letter suggesting concrete action plans to make that happen.

I started writing a response on his blog but it got a little too big for a comment so I moved it here. Regular readers have seen the data before (especially in my recent post on goodwill) so please excuse the repetition. Read more

Corporate Web Disclosure

Great post here from the Q4 blog on examples of companies starting to use web disclosure as a corporate reporting strategy under new guidelines issued by the SEC. It cites a couple examples including BGC Partners and GM:

The lesson from GM is that what’s needed to aid news dissemination is to get people to follow you. This supports the importance of building a subscriber base and transitioning to a web disclosure model over time, while you use notice-and-access releases and other methods to let the market know where you disclose your information, and how they can receive automatic updates.

Here’s my post from awhile back on a sample site built by PWC to show a different approach to corporate reporting. The changes outlined here are a great first step toward the ideal set out by PWC.

Accounting Standards and Real Value

I just reviewed here The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors Are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik and David Pitt-Watson. It’s a great book about how ownership of stocks is now dominated by funds (whose money comes from ordinary people). These players have different goals–they value stability of the system over success of an individual company. Read more

CEO’s Want Intellectual Capital Assessment (But Do Not Know It–Yet)

PWC just released their annual CEO Survey. There is a whole website presenting the data here (an interesting approach in itself).  Thanks to David Philips’ Corporate Reporting Blog, I spent extra time on page 27 of the survey report here.

It turns out that the CEO responses highlighted significant information gaps between what they see as important to their business and where they feel they have “comprehensive” information. The areas of where the gap was acute Read more

Reporting in the FTSE 350

I recommend that you read Joining the Dots, a white paper by David Philips of PWC (you can find the paper and an accompanying video here). The paper summarizes a study of the narrative reporting by the largest 350 public companies in the UK. It puts forth the thesis that narrative reporting Read more

Filed Under: IC Measurement
Tagged: David Philips, FTSE 350, IC Factory, Joining the Dots, Knowledge Assets, Narrative Reporting, PWC, S&P 500

A New Approach to Annual Reports

December 4, 2008 by Mary Adams · 3 Comments 

I recently happened upon an interesting site that I somehow hadn’t found until now called Report Leadership.

It was a joint effort last year by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), the Corporate Reporting group at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and the design firm Radley Yeldar.

The group took it upon themselves to build a new annual report. The site explains their thought process and includes a sample web-based annual report for a fictitious company.

Having been a consumer of annual reports since my early career as a high risk lender, I can tell you Read more

Filed Under: IC Measurement
Tagged: Annual Reports, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, CIMA, IC Measurement, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, PWC, Radley Yeldar