Research Services - Analysing trends in annual report language and content

Descriptions

***THIS IS A CONTRACT AWARD NOTICE*** Background and Context The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) regulates auditors, accountants and actuaries and sets the UK's Corporate Governance and Stewardship Codes. We seek to promote transparency and integrity in business; our work is aimed at investors and others who rely on company accounts, audit, and high-quality risk management. As the Competent Authority for audit in the UK, the FRC sets auditing and ethical standards and monitors and enforces audit quality. The FRC Lab ('the Lab') provides an environment where investors and companies can come together to develop pragmatic solutions to today's reporting needs: •As a learning space, companies can use the Lab to test new reporting formats with investors, and investors can indicate areas where management can add greater value through the information they provide. •As a hub to support innovation in reporting, the Lab's focus on gathering and sharing evidence from the market provides the broader corporate community with feedback from shareholders on the value that new reporting formats bring. The FRC Lab commissioned research which will add to the understanding of recent trends in annual reports and how these impact the length and usefulness of reporting. PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES The aim of this research project is to answer the following sets of questions: •How much (and which parts) of the annual report is 'boiler plate', static, or changing over time? •How have risk disclosures in annual reports changed over time (including the average time for a given risk to crystallise and then subsequently be removed from reporting)? Which risks are identified and disclosed most frequently across all companies, and categories of companies (e.g. sizes, sectors)? •How consistent are business model-related disclosures over time? How often do these disclosures change significantly? How much is 'boiler plate'? To what extent are business model-related disclosures consistent with the financial statements (including segmental and other 'back half' disclosures)? •How much forward-looking / strategic language exists in the annual report and accounts compared to backward-looking language? How is this split relatively between subsections of the annual report and accounts? •How have annual reports and accounts, including subsections1, increased in length and complexity over time? SCOPE This research will cover the annual reporting of all FTSE 350 listed companies; we expect trends to identified, with respect to the research questions above, based on at least five years of past reporting (2017 to 2021). ***AWARD NOTICE***