The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) has now released the results of its 2007 survey entitled Financial Reporting Supply Chain: Current Perspectives and Directions. The survey was commissioned to investigate whether all the recent changes to financial reporting practices have in fact achieved their objectives of making financial reports more or less reliable, relevant and understandable.  
 
The report examines four key areas of the financial reporting process: corporate governance and the preparation, audit and usefulness of financial reports. It concludes that while the relevance and reliability of financial information worldwide has improved, the understandability of financial reports has not. Positive benefits of all the changes included improved quality of information as a result of better standards and regulatory processes while negative aspects included the increasing complexity of reports, disclosure overload and the use of fair values which is impairing usefulness.  
 
The report also calls for further improvements in the area of communication between all participants in the financial reporting supply chain process, higher quality short form reporting and better aligned internal and external reporting. 
The full text of the report is available for the IFAC bookstore. 
 
This article was taken from ANT20/2008 and is current up to 30 May 2008