A Vision Problem at Top Audit Firms

The story, at first, seemed startling. In early November, The Financial Times reported that the chief executives of the six biggest accounting firms were set to come out with a plan for a completely new model for reporting corporate financial information.

The Big Four-plus-Two's idea would be to replace ungainly quarterly and annual reporting with a "real-time" model that wouldn't rely so heavily on 10-Qs and 10-Ks, according to the newspaper. Besides timeliness, the model would have a second linchpin: the unveiling of a whole slew of nonfinancial data to complement the financials.

Coming hard on the heels of commissioner Christopher Cox's announcement of a $54 million outlay aimed at putting the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system into an XBRL format, a forward-looking stance on financial reporting by the top accounting execs seemed certain to boost the momentum for change considerably.

Sure enough, soon after the FT article, a report with the weighty title "Global Capital Markets and the Global Economy: A Vision from the CEOs of the International Audit Networks" came out under the bylines of Samuel DiPiazza, CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers; William Parrett, CEO of Deloitte; Mike Rake, chairman of KPMG; James Turley, chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young; David McDonnell, CEO of Grant Thornton; and Frans Samyn, chief executive of BDO.

But now there seemed to be less to the plan than met the eye. The "essay," as it's called, leads off with a set of proposed current and near-term solutions that seems more self-serving than visionary.

Most notably, the report argues for curbing auditing firms' liability and relaxing the rules governing auditors' scope of service. (The theme of legal and regulatory loosening was echoed on Thursday by the report by the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which called on Congress to look carefully at "the case for caps on liability or safe harbors to prevent the failure of another auditing firm" like Arthur Andersen.)

Such a beginning isn't likely to overcome the considerable inertia of CFOs toward the subjects of XBRL and more extensive reporting of their business operations. Many feel that the upfront costs and administrative burdens will continue to underwhelm finance chiefs' appetite for huge reporting innovations.

But at least one corporate executive, Bob Laux, Microsoft's director of technical accounting and reporting, thinks that once finance executives get past the initial burdens of complying with the internal-controls provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and AS2, the related audit rule, they'll be more open to new reporting models. (Microsoft, it should be noted, is one of about two dozen companies participating in an XBRL pilot program with the SEC, and has also included some XBRL plug-ins in recent versions of Excel.)

"Given the current focus on revising AS2 and the pending SEC guidance for companies, I believe that focus will continue in the short term. In the long term, I do believe corporate finance executives will express more and more interest in these subjects," Laux told CFO.com.

Indeed, the tone the audit chiefs strike in calling for the construction of a "new reporting model" over the long haul might catch the attention of some finance executives. The auditors, for one thing, envision a time when, aided by XBRL (eXtensible business reporting language), corporations will provide data in such a way as to make quarterly forecasts obsolete.

Ironically, "more frequently reported information may reverse some or much of the 'short-term-ism' about which corporate managers and others have long complained," they say. "Once investors have almost real-time access to financial and other information about companies, forecasting 'quarterly' profit numbers will no longer be relevant, while forecasts of daily or weekly profits will be pointless."

But XBRL — the authors hedge by adding "or perhaps other reporting related technologies" — won't be the only agent of change. Along with a streamlined way of presenting data will come a much richer menu of information content, including large amounts of nonfinancial corporate information.

Investors want financial reports "to contain more relevant information than just the financial statements and the footnotes explaining them," the auditors contend. The huge gaps between book and market value at many companies, for instance, strongly suggest that financials don't supply the information about intangible assets that investors increasingly seek, they say.

Although they don't refer to it directly, the audit chiefs were signing on to an agenda of what's called enhanced business reporting (EBR). Under EBR, companies would buttress their financial reporting with data about such things as repeat purchases, technological innovations, and employee turnover rates — thus providing a fuller picture of their operations than mere earnings reports can.

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