CPE Session 28: Sunday, August 3, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM

The New Business and Financial Reporting Model

(Accounting – Advanced)

Description/Objectives:
Corporate Business and Financial Reporting has been undergoing a transformation over recent years. From the published paper based Annual Report to a situation now that also includes a variety of continuous disclosures, web based reporting, governance and social responsibility reporting. All are inter-related and all have been changing dramatically. The result is a new reporting paradigm that is not well understood. This session presents a body of research on the manner in which some 50 items of information are presented in annual reports, summary annual reports, websites and regulatory information and considers the importance of each. It covers 125 public companies and is informed by a recent study published by the CICA of which the presenter was the chair. The presentation will explore the issues of which types of information are the most important, whether companies are presenting that information and how they are doing it. The presentation also presents background tabular information on the survey companies. It concludes with observations on the current state of financial and business reporting in terms of the conventional reporting models and explores the direction those models are taking.

Presenter:
Gerald Trites, Research Fellow – University of Waterloo Centre for Information Systems Assurance

Note: CPE fields of study are in parentheses