Traditional financial statements fail to satisfy users' needs for information because they provide only a partial view regarding a company's risk profile. Recently, risk reporting has become the focus of interest. This, however, has not been translated into empirical research that investigates risk reporting in corporate annual reports. This study addresses this gap through examining risk reporting practices in Egypt. The key objectives are to measure the extent of mandatory and voluntary risk reporting, identify the nature of voluntary risk reporting and investigate firm characteristics, corporate governance and ownership structure that could explain variation in risk reporting practices in the annual reports of Egyptian companies. In addition, the study aims to identify factors that may obstruct the presentation of risk reporting in annual reports of Egyptian companies. In the first phase, the annual reports of 106 listed companies for the years 2006/2007 were examined to measure the extent of risk reporting and examine potential determinants of risk reporting. In the second phase, 15 semi-structured interviews were carried out with academics, external auditors, regulators and financial managers to identify factors that may obstruct risk reporting in corporate annual reports. Results indicate a low level of compliance with mandatory risk reporting requirements. Also, results indicate a low extent of voluntary risk reporting with a tendency to report more past and qualitative than future and quantitative risk-related information. It is suggested that competition, role duality, board size, ownership concentration, profitability and auditor type influence the risk reporting practices of Egyptian companies. The study identified accounting practice problems (such as lack of effective profession and enforcement mechanisms), accounting education problems (such as inadequate local accounting textbooks) and the Egyptian culture of secrecy, as key obstacles to the presentation of risk reporting in corporate annual reports.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:558711 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Mokhtar, Ekramy Said |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55461/ |
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