The purpose of this blog is to identify and examine (i) ways of improving financial reporting standards (both international and national) and (ii) the way that those standards are developed. Contributions are welcome from anyone with an interest in the subject. They should be submitted to mail@21cfrs.com. The hope is to engender and encourage novel solutions. But the first part of finding solutions has to be defining problems. There is an old engineering adage that if you

The purpose of financial reports is to provide the users of those reports with certain information. For the standard setter the questions then are: who are those users that financial reporting standards (FRS) should be designed to assist, and what is the information that FRS should require being included? This post will focus on the first of these questions, who are the users that standard setters should be designing FRS for, and the next post will consider the second questi

There is much discussion concerning the use of AI in preparing and auding financial reports. But very little is being said (as far as I can see) about how AI can assist users of financial reports. AI will be transformative for users of financial reports. AI has the ability to upload information from financial reports directly into users’ models. AI agents will have to be trained to do this. And financial reports will need to clearly label information so that AI can find th