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FRC publishes its Annual Review of Corporate Reporting

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has now published its Annual Review of Corporate Reporting for the current season. The report sets out the key themes arising from the FRC’s ongoing monitoring activities during 2022 and their key messages to companies ahead of the 2022/23 reporting season. Whilst these are targeted at large corporates, the messages generally apply across all middle market businesses.

Key findings of reviews completed in 2022

Businesses should consider the items most frequently identified by the FRC in their 2022 reviews when preparing their upcoming financial statements, including:

1. Cash flow statements

The FRC continues to identify a significant number of errors in cash flow statements, despite its 2020 Thematic review on Cash Flow and Liquidity Disclosures. Over half of the re-statements identified this year were in respect of the misclassification of cash flows. In addition, businesses had inconsistently applied accounting policies for similar items, such as interest payments on leases and interest on borrowings. The FRC also noted discrepancies between amounts presented in the cash flow statement and amounts disclosed elsewhere in the financial statements.

Businesses should ensure that they carefully review their cash flow statements to ensure the classification of cash flows complies with the requirements of the relevant standard, accounting policies for cash flows have been consistently applied and adjustments for material non-cash transactions are disclosed.

2. Financial instruments

The FRC found that accounting policies and disclosures did not fully explain how particular financing arrangements or transactions were reflected in the financial statements, in particular with respect to the accounting for derivatives and cash flow hedges. In addition, disclosures for non-banking entities applying IFRS did not always include the inputs, assumptions, and estimation techniques in applying the ECL model.

Businesses should ensure the nature and extent of material risks arising from financial instruments (including inflation and rising interest rates) and related risk management methods are adequately disclosed, including the methods used to measure exposure to risks and changes in the year.

Expected credit loss (ECL) models should be revisited to ensure assumptions reflect the current and future economic conditions as appropriate, including default rates, and disclosure of ECL should include the approach and significant assumptions applied, and concentrations of risks.

Banking covenants should be disclosed (unless the probability of any breach is considered remote) together with an explanation of the effect of refinancing, and changes to covenant arrangements.

3. Income taxes

The two main issues identified by the FRC were a lack of evidence to support the recognition of deferred tax assets and insufficient explanations for significant items in the effective tax rate reconciliation.

Businesses are encouraged to disclose the nature of evidence to support the recognition of material deferred tax assets, along with the significant judgements and estimation uncertainty underpinning the recognition at the reporting date. Companies should ensure they adequately explain material items in their effective tax rate reconciliation.

Key messages for 2022/23 accounts

Reporting in uncertain times

Businesses are facing unprecedented challenges due to unstable economic conditions with rising inflation, increasing interest rates, constraints in supply chains and labour markets, as well as changes to consumer behaviour.

The financial statements should clearly explain the risks and changes in the business environment, including how these risks and uncertainties are reflected in the strategy, business model, and going concern and viability assessments.

Impact of rising inflation and interest rates

The FRC specifically stated that entities need to consider the impact of both rising inflation and interest rates on their annual reporting:

Wider economic environment

In addition to rising inflation and interest rates, the financial reporting impacts of changes in the wider economic environment, as further explained in our Macro-economic factors: latest financial reporting insights article, are likely to include:

Overall expectations for disclosures for 2022/23

The FRC’s overall expectations for disclosures include:

For further information, please get in touch with Lou Ward, or your usual RSM contact.

authors:louise-ward