Annual reports have turned to be major tools of public relations. Currently the idea of just publishing the “standard packaged in the ERPS” report is unthinkable. Annual reports are tools of “spin” While this is not a palatable thought for many it is clear that the future world is one of more and more regulatory compliance and consequently the organization provisioning substantively more information. The spin mentality must give way to multi-dimensional realistic reporting that is drawn directly off corporate systems and deposited or delivered to users without expensive (PR) manipulation. Specific reputational penalties must ensue from issuing stale, erroneous and opaque information. Today’s paranoid concern for breaches in competitive intelligence where competitors discover important economic facts about the reporting business must give way to a more data cooperative attitude where the society and the corporation benefits from the existence of comparison benchmarks in the many facets of business. Just like today entire sectors cooperate in the development of XML derivative standards to create interoperability between applications and data transitivity in the value chain these sectors must cooperate in the development of disclosure standards that can be compared and used for industry benchmarking. Competitiveness has to be preserved by fast ever improving processes, timely research and aggressive data sharing not by self-serving paranoid opacity that slows the progress of science and interferes in the natural economic optimizing process of allocation of capital.
