Developments in Internet Financial Reporting: Review and Analysis Across Five Developed Countries

Internet based corporate reporting is wide spread amongst companies of all sizes inmost countries around the world. The development of online reporting practice has beenrapid, largely mirroring, and motivated by, the development of the world-wide-web since1994, being the primary Internet medium for online reporting. A number of studies of thesedevelopments have occurred over this time seeking to plot how companies are exploiting themedia of the Internet and how they are developing their reporting practices in response to thisubiquitous route to current and potential investors, and other stakeholders. In this paper, wedevelop this literature further by extending the benchmarks that have been created to monitorthis activity since the mid 1990s. This study focuses on the very largest companies in fivecountries around the world. It examines online reporting practices of 250 companies at theend of 2001 and in early 2002 by creating a detailed attribute analysis of common factorsacross the companies examined. In addition to illustrating developments in online reportingpractices since the previous extensive studies were conducted in 1999 and early 2000, theresults provide new insight into recent changes in this domain. It particularly illustrates hownewer, more interactive, aspects of Internet technologies are now being exploited to enable usto benchmark these activities to follow their use in the near future. The paper then addressesthe relationship between the size of companies and its level of reporting practices, and thedifferences between reporting practices of large companies listed primarily in the differentcountries examined. These results illustrate that reporting practices differ significantly betweencompanies in different domains.