The Q4 team attended the CICA corporate reporting awards (CRA) earlier today at the Carlu in College Park in downtown Toronto. In 
attendance were myself who has served as a judge for the annual awards in the electronic disclosure category for the past three years, Catherine Crofton our VP Sales & Marketing who has also participated as a judge in the electronic disclosure category for the past seven years and Karen Adams our Client Relations Director.
The CRA is in its 58th year and presents awards for excellence in financial reporting, corporate governance disclosure, electronic disclosure and sustainable development reporting to companies listed on the TSX and to federal Crown corporations. Separate excellence and honourable mention awards are also presented to reports that are judged to be the best, regardless of industry sector, in each of these four judging areas. Lastly, among the industry winners, one company is given the overall award of excellence for corporate reporting.
A lot of the companies were repeat winners from last year and Q4 would like to take this opportunity to extend our congratulations to all of them!
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As you may recall, we blogged about a NIRI session we attended “Understanding IR Strategies Behind XBRL – IROs Evolving Role”. In this post we provided a broad overview of why XBRL is relevant to IROs and the requirements for adoption, a broad definition and the implications of using it to help improve processes.
Recently a report was published by The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) targeted to CFO’s entitled “Transition to XBRL”. In spite of this being issued in Canada, the report provides a balanced review of what is required for U.S. companies and foreign private issuers under the SEC’s implementation schedule for XBRL as well as highlighting significant developments in the implementation of XBRL as it pertains to Canadian preparers.
It also explores the benefits and downfalls of implementation and offers some practical tips that are applicable and easily adaptable to issuers in both the U.S. and Canada. I do recommend that you read the report in its entirety and keep it handy for reference, but wanted to provide some of its highlights.
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In a recent edition of IR Alert, Jeffrey D. Morgan, CAE, President and CEO, National Investor Relations Institute cites “the top challenge facing IR now is regulation including moves to have companies become more transparent, governance changes and generally looking at corporate practices. Regulation is one of the key challenges right now. It’s evolving rapidly and where we’ll end up is not quite known.”
What follows is some of his advice to IR professionals for keeping pace in this rapidly changing regulatory environment. He also discusses current challenges and opportunities and ways to address them.
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Last week our CEO, Darrell Heaps, and I presented to a study group formed through an initiative of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) Research Studies Department. Comprised primarily of volunteers, this panel of experienced professionals research and provide guidance for comprehensive and integrated corporate reporting in order to promote effective communication.
By reading their reports and following their guidance, any IRO in North America can improve the standards of their company’s stakeholder communications.
To familiarize you more with their work, I have provided an overview of their most recent study, Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders.
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As usual, there were a lot of great sessions to choose from at NIRI’s Annual Conference from June 7-10 in Florida. The Q4 team attended as many as we could which meant we didn’t always have the time to do write a blog post that day. What follows is an overview of a session I attended on Tuesday, June 9th entitled “Understanding IR Strategies Behind XBRL – IROs Evolving Role”.
Moderator/Lead Speaker:
Mike Willis, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Chairman, XBRL International
Panelist(s)/Co-Speaker(s):
Michael Becker, VP, Global Disclosure & Financial Reporting Services
Business Wire
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Seeing as many of you may be hip-deep in annual reporting I thought I’d share this interesting piece with you. A designer named Nicholas Felton has published an annual report of his life for the last 3 years. Although fluffy from a content perspective, Nicholas has some very creative ways to display the information of the year gone by. Read more…
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
