“Aren’t standard setters and big accounting firms behaving just like the different car companies?” a someone said to me. “Why?” I asked.

“Every other year, these entities try their very best to push new reporting needs down our throats. Many years ago, the fashion then was to push for Triple Bottom Line reporting where we placed emphasis on companies to report their social and environmental impacts.

A few years ago, the lingo in fashion was corporate governance leading to the Code being adopted as guidelines and thus increased the number of pages in the annual financial reports.

A few years ago, the public listed companies were pushed towards quarterly reporting. Recently, UK has the courage to decide to backtrack on this. The rest of the world awaits the outcome.

The latest model for 2013/2014 is Integrated Reporting.

Key questions – who are we producing all these reports for and is anybody reading them?”

Hmm… something to think about over lunch.