Q4 Blog

Article from Don Tappscot from the first day of the World World Economic Forum in Davos showed up yesterday. It has an interesting note about transparency that I wanted to share:

One of most insightful for me was with Samuel DiPiazza, the CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers. PWC has been a leader in the next generation of reporting – they call it value reporting – where the financial report is about al lot more than earnings and financial information. XBRL and the Web 2.0 are poised to transform reporting, where the focus will not just be on compliance but on transparency.

I wonder whether PWC could finally cash in on its leadership position in this area. More important, next-generation reporting could help companies be better understood by their stakeholders, including shareholders, not to mention bring some transparency to financial markets and in doing so possibly avoid crises such as the one we are currently experiencing.

Transparency is certainly a signficant trend in corporate disclosure that we’ll be covering more in this blog over the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, XBRL, Corporate Disclosure, Corporate Reporting, Best Practices, PWC, Tapscott, Davos

With the over arching trend of corporate disclosure being transparency, the pressures and risk of creating and distributing disclosure continue to increase. In addition to the financial disclosures, the majority of corporate disclosure occurs in non-financial form. These include commmunications such as press releases, corporate reports, presentations and web site content. The information disclosed through these channels is critical to providing the context and insight into the operations and results of your company. Not surprisingly, all of this information represents significant strategic value to your company while also representing significant risk should information be disclosed inaccurately or in a selective (non-RegFD) manner. Read more…

CSR is a big word and seems to attract attention from many aspects. 

Unfortunately, recent survey results suggest many US companies are not going to impliment such a policy this year either.  This news is from a slightly different perspective than I’m used to reading it from, being an HR based company – but CSR covers a lot of ground and there’s room for everyone.

I think I like the perspective of this opinion bit - that CSR comes from community and government enforcement.  Waiting for businesses to change on their own will take too much time…

I think what makes CSR that much harder is that it’s so hard to measure, in terms that mean the right things to the right people, anyhow.  There are guidelines available – and a place to read the reports - but I still haven’t found a good way to reflect on them as a group, yet.