Corporate Reporting in India: Financial and Social Performance Disclosers

Since the emergence of corporate form of business organization, accountability through periodic disclosures has been the foundation of good corporate governance. This book aims at the public sector levels of corporate governance. This book aims at analyzing the levels of corporate disclosures by the public sector entities in India. Levels of disclosures by the companies have been explored for the non-statutory informal items, termed extended corporate reporting (ECR). Some distinct features of the book are as follows: It explains theoretical concepts the corporate reporting by referencing them to the general framework of an informational system. Information supplied through the corporate annual reports (CARs) has been categorized into disclosure mandated by the statute law (statutory disclosures); and non-statutory (additional disclosures). This book has focused on the latter. Corporate reporting behaviour in terms of additional disclosures has been analyzed for three sets of informational items. These are: complete set of (actual) additional disclosures, termed ‘extended corporate reporting’ (ECR), and two sub-sets of ECR –termed ‘extended financial reporting’ (EFR), and ‘extended social reporting’ (ESR). The analysis is aligned closely to the four objectives of the book, namely discovering what is being disclosed; assessing how useful are the disclosure; observing where are the disclosures made; and explaining why do the disclosures cary? For explaining why the levels of disclosures vary across the companies, a multivariate analytical model has been designed. Findings of the book will be useful to the research scholars, research institutions, business executives including industry accountants and auditors.