Voluntary corporate governance disclosures in the annual reports: an empirical study

Abstract

Corporate governance (CG) disclosure is a fundamental theme of the 'modern' corporate-regulatory system, which encompasses providing 'governance' information to the public in a variety of ways. This study explores the voluntary CG practices of 50 corporations, over and above the mandatory requirements of clause 49 of the listing agreement. In order to study the voluntary CG disclosure practices, a 'content analysis' was done, and finally, a 'CG disclosure' index was prepared. We have primarily used 'secondary' sources of information, both from the 'report on CG' and the 'annual reports' for the financial year 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. As a part of voluntary CG disclosure, a total of 40 items have been selected from the CG section of the annual reports and proxy forms. In order to provide a comparison 'across' industries, corporations have been selected from four industries, viz., software, textiles, sugar and paper. Appropriate statistical tools and techniques have been applied for the analysis. It has been observed that "corporations are following less than 50 percent of the items of CG disclosure index. Moreover, there is no significant difference among the disclosure scores across the four industries".

Integrated Reporting in Developing Countries: Evidence from Malawi

“…The annual reports were analysed and a "1" was assigned when an item on the disclosure framework (see TABLE 3) is disclosed and a "0" when it is not disclosed in the annual reports. The scoring methodology is consistent with other related annual report disclosure studies (Tsamenyi et al, 2007;Hossain, 2008;Bhasin, 2012;Biobele et al, 2013;Lipunga, 2014). Sinceneed to prepared "integrated report" is not explicitly given in the Malawi Code II, no company was expected to prepare a standalone integrated report.…”

Managing Projects Using Forensic Accounting in Detection and Prevention of Fraud in Ghana

“…Investigation of Allegation: The skills of forensic examination were suitable in this case, in the sense that various complaints and allegations could be used as a guild for gathering evidence used in an investigation. This was mentioned as being proactive since such a system is important to the detection and prevention of fraud [1] .…”

“…Previous business scandals took the industry by surprise not merely due to the magnitude of the loss, however additionally due to the invention that dubious accounting practices were largely deceptive and extensive than earlier projected" [1] . All projects could be exposed to the risk of fraud.…”

Implementation of corporate governance and mandatory disclosure in the Indonesian banking sector: good news or bad news

“…The delivery of financial report information to the public, whether mandatory or voluntary, generally does not disclose all items. Bhasin (2012) argues that companies only disclose less than 50% of their disclosure index items, but Bhasin (2012) only presents a percentage of these items. Therefore, further research must be conducted to investigate the effect of incomplete disclosure on performance, including credit risk management.…”