The Australian Reporting Environment - Telling it like it is

Corporate reporting has been under the spotlight in recent years, with widespread concern as to the volume and complexity of the global and local reporting environments, and the varied levels of transparency practised by companies. For over a decade, PwC has been working with corporate management and investment professionals to gain a more complete understanding of the information needed to assess performance.

Our research program has continued with our efforts to gain insight into the views of investment professionals in major markets around the world, including Australia. The views of the Australian investment community are presented in the report The Australian Reporting Environment - telling it like it is, while the results of our global investment community surveys are summarised in Corporate reporting - is it what investment professionals expect?

This initiative makes an important contribution to a deeper understanding of the attitude of the investment community towards corporate communication and changes in accounting principles.

Both reports were launched recently to the investment community by Alison Thomas, PwC's Global Director of Research. The event made for some robust discussion, where analysts from the major investment banks confirmed that the GAAP financials are still the bedrock for financial analysis, but there were currently information gaps.

Another interesting fact from the survey is the advent of the ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) analyst in Australia – these are teams of quantitative analysts attempting to correlate ESG performance with financial success, and to provide ESG inputs to valuation models.