If reports are to earn the trust of their company’s stakeholders, and become widely used as credible sources of useful information, what should corporate South Africa be doing differently? This article calls for corporate leadership to do the right thing and say it like it is.
In her final column for the Business Report, Ann Crotty tackled the subject of annual reporting credibility with comment on Caxton’s recently released 2013 Annual Report. She begins: “You should know that when Caxton’s annual report can be considered as one of the best to be produced by a JSE-listed company, something has gone horribly wrong with the whole concept of corporate disclosure.”
After debating whether the report is “on the money” or not, she notes that it is a truly wonderful thing that you, the reader, have to trip through only 64 pages to “get the misleading impression that you know something about Caxton”. Meanwhile, “other companies will force you to wade through as many as 600 pages before leaving you with the same misleading impression...”.
Read more: The power of balanced reporting