Corporate Reporting Framework (CRF): Benchmarking Tata Motors against AB Volvo and Exploring Future Challenges

Abstract

Confidence in the corporate sector has been severely challenged since Enron's collapse. With each revelation of corporate misconduct and accounting malpractice, trust and goodwill are declining fast, creating doubts in investors' minds. Thus, high standards of corporate governance and transparency are becoming important, more so for emerging economies who try to attract global investors and have only a small number of core companies that contribute a significant portion of their economy. Even though disclosure of financial information is mandated by various acts and regulations all over the world and is followed to a certain extent, there is not much thrust on transparency and disclosure of non-financial information - both from the methodology and practice point of view. The present study critically examines existing models and frameworks on corporate reporting and transparency with special focus on non-financial information. The paper also proposes a new framework for the same which contains the best practices of existing ones and also new areas as per the demands of today's business. In this context, Corporate Governance Responsibility (CGR) which plays a major role pertaining to structure, process for direction and control of companies and Extensive Business Reporting Language (XBRL) which is going to be the language for tomorrow's corporate reporting have been discussed as strong enablers for practicing corporate transparency. Finally, annual reports for automobile giants-Tata Motors and AB Volvo are compared through qualitative analyses as per the proposed framework and challenges for implementing CRF are also discussed.