Corporate integrated reporting
Question:
What is the primary goal of Corporate Integrated Reporting, and how does it aim to benefit financial statement users?
Answer
Introduction
Corporate Integrated Reporting is a move taken to streamline, make clear, and improve the utility of a company's reporting forms. In addition to the disclosures in the financial statements, several other disclosures, such as social and environmental declarations, have become requirements for businesses. These reports have up until now been created as individual reports, which is a very time-consuming and laborious process. Corporate Integrated Reporting is therefore being considered for deployment in order to streamline corporations' reporting patterns (Druckman, 2013). The primary goal of this type of reporting is to help readers of financial statements and reports comprehend and analyse the company's position more quickly and effectively. Every organisation will find the use of Corporate Integrated Reporting, or CIR, to their great advantage in terms of time and effort savings (Slaper& Hall, 2011).
Corporate Integrated Reporting's primary objectives are:
1. Giving financial statement consumers high-quality information.
Making the changeover to corporate integrated reporting is mostly done in an effort to give financial statement users high-quality information. The government, shareholders, banks, creditors, investors, and other stakeholders are only a few examples of the users. All of these individuals are the firm's stakeholders, and as such, they are fully entitled to check the company's financial standing given that they have invested money, reputation, and capital in each individual company. Additionally, the company's financial reports will be more transparent, resulting in increased capital investment and more efficient capital allocation (Jorgensen & Soderstrom, 2012). The primary goal of integrated reporting involved gathering all firm data in the most practical way.
2. Improvement in responsiveness and accountability.
Through the reports that firms give to their users, integrated corporate reporting seeks to increase responsibility and answerability. Each user and reader of the financial statement cannot contact the company with queries about the information contained in the financial statements. As a result, the reporting structure should be such that it is self-explanatory and clears up any confusion among financial statement consumers (Eccles &Krzus, 2010). Such integrated reports will be used to achieve this goal. For instance, a corporation delivers all of its reports to the banks when it requests financial help from financial institutions and banks. The financial analysts read all the reports, but it's conceivable that they won't be able to directly comprehend the company's financial situation because of the variety of reports that are provided. As a result, the business might not be able to disclose its true financial and nonfinancial condition (Pyo& Lee, 2013). As a result, CIR is required in this situation so that the company may deliver the relevant data to the financial institutions and other users in a manner that is self-explanatory.