What else we intend to deliver

The first two major projects that the CAN plans to address are ALE from the CAN – which addresses how companies can provide the data needed to support the local economies in which they operate and make them more resilient for the benefit of all who live in a locality – and People CAN – which has the aim of enhancing employee reporting. However, the CAN has greater ambition than this and aims to tackle a number of other issues as well during its first years of operation.

Firstly, working with academic partners, the CAN aims to explore the theoretical and practical problems of fully embracing accounting for climate change. The issues involved are numerous and complicated, and the details of this project will be announced if and when funding is secured for it.

Secondly, the CAN hopes to work on a project on corporate resilience with members of the investment community. This will seek to identify and report clearly upon those characteristics within the existing accounting framework of companies that indicate whether or not a company is likely to be durable in the long term, or not. This project is dependent upon funding being secured.

Thereafter the CAN wants to look at two long term concerns of its director, Richard Murphy:

• The first is country-by-country reporting (CBCR), which Richard first created as an idea in 2003. This will involve promotion of the anticipated Global Reporting Initiative standard on this issue, with the intention of supporting this becoming a mandatory EU wide standard. The required accounting demands that this will create will be an issue on which the CAN will focus, as experience on other CBCR disclosures to date suggests that without detailed accounting rules CBCR can fail to deliver on its objectives.
• The other such issues is the accounting for tax in published accounts as this is an area where accounting data has, to date, failed to provide information of use to tax authorities, researchers, users of accounts and other wishing to appraise whether, how and why a company is compliant with the tax obligations imposed upon it, or not. Details of thinking on this project will be published in due course.

In addition, the CAN will also be actively engaged in lobbying for enhanced corporate disclosure and improved accounting for the benefit of all the stakeholders of a company whenever the opportunity to do so arises. We anticipate having a busy time.