For investors who think their portfolio companies need to do a better job of providing useful nonfinancial information, 2014 is shaping up to be a good year. But until now there's been good reason to gripe about the state of corporate reporting on everything from environmental impact to possible links with human-rights controversies. In a recent international survey of investors and analysts by the London-based Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and the Paris-based European Sustainable Investment Forum, 78 percent of respondents said that current disclosure on nonfinancial matters is inadequate. Meanwhile, 93 percent believed that disclosure doesn't shed enough light on how important these so-called soft factors are to investment decisions. "If investors can't easily see which companies are outperforming not only on financials but on sustainability performance, it's just too hard [to use sustainability data in their investing]," says Jean Rogers, founder and executive director of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. "Even if they want to use this information, they're not able to."
展开▼
