Following England’s tense victory over Slovenia in the World Cup this week which I watched with fellow CIMA staff in the Council Chamber, I attended a Tomorrow’s Corporate Reporting project meeting with colleagues from Tomorrow’s Company and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The meeting was significantly more relaxed but nonetheless successful.
What’s this project all about? Well it was featured on June 24 in the prestigious Accountancy column in the London Financial Times which is great news. For a number of years CIMA, along with others, have been striving to promote good practice in corporate reporting especially in relation to narrative reporting of strategy, business models, incentive alignment, corporate governance and risk.
Yet despite all this work, we still suffer cases of far less than perfect reporting i.e. Lehman’s Repo 105. The three founding partners in this project are all intrigued by this apparent anomaly and have come together to try to find out why.
We are proposing a programme of research which will ask internationally ‘What aspects of the system are preventing or supporting the effective development of corporate reporting? And what changes are needed to make the system fit for purpose for the future?
Phase I of this project involves a global ‘call for evidence’ which will be officially launched next week and this will be followed by a number of dialogues which will seek to inform and deepen our understanding of the major barriers to more widespread take-up of effective corporate reporting. And that highlights one of the more frustrating points – some companies are excellent at reporting and have fully grasped the opportunity corporate reports provide to really communicate with their stakeholders; whereas others seem stuck in the last century treating their reports as mere compliance documents.
There will be more about this project here on CIMASphere over the course of the next few days and I urge you to become involved. Please register your interest in hearing more about this exciting project by emailing
evidence@tomorrowscompany.com and respond to the call for evidence when it is published next week. I look forward to reading your comments.
By the way good luck to all those still in the World Cup (well mostly). The tournament has been wonderful display of the growing globalisation of the sport at the top level, the strong showing from African and Asian countries has been inspiring and, I agree with the great Pele, it cannot be long before a non-South American / non-European team wins this competition.