Corporate reporting - a focus on accountability and communications

Companies use their annual reports to fulfill their legal and regulatory requirements and to communicate with stakeholders. Annual reports summarize all the crucial issues that affect the success of the business, explain how they have influenced the past year’s results, forecast how they might pan out in the future, and explain what is being done to ensure the company’s future success in that environment. Annual reports cannot and should not focus on every single issue that is relevant to every single stakeholder. They should focus on the issues that are material to the business as a whole, bring them together in a single, coherent story and reveal the “value proposition” of the total business. For more on this perspective of corporate reporting, refer to The Future of Corporate Reporting: State of Play – February 2007.