Trends in Financial Reporting: A Report for the ICAEW Centre for Business Performance

Commentators agree that the internet will force substantial changes in financial reporting. This new report from the Centre collects the views of experts in auditing, academic, business and regulatory affairs on both present trends and the prospects for 2010. Immediate trends identified are: growing interactive communication plus wider and cheaper dissemination; increasing fears about data security and confidentiality; surges in non-financial (especially social and environmental) information making for harder auditing; problems with date overload (through confidentiality concerns will continue to thwart wider access to raw data); potential challenges to accounting-based auditing by IT professionals; and regulatory inaction on internet reporting. By 2010: huge demand for financial information with corporate reporting becoming a subset of electronic commerce; increasingly sophisticated users drawing information from the internet; auditing staying reactive, but continuous audit becoming significant, quarterly or even monthly internet reporting may be mandatory; seals support audit reports and a new assurance IT industry may be on the rise; regulators struggling to regulate the internet at both national and international levels; and increasingly integrated voice, data and image telecommunications.