The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers

Chapter 16Implementation

In which we outline how our proposed disclosure—the Strategic Resources & Consequences Report—could be implemented by companies to provide investors with actionable information hitherto unavailable in corporate financial reports. Short of new regulations, which we don’t prescribe, how could corporate managers, who are already heavily burdened by extensive accounting and financial reporting regulations, be motivated to impart with the information outlined in our Report? Wishful thinking? We think not. In fact, we propose in this chapter an evidence-based, noncoercive way to elicit the required information from business enterprises.

How to Elicit the Proposed Information

We outlined and demonstrated in the preceding five chapters the new information paradigm we propose managers share with investors. We have shown that this information is prescribed by economic theory as key to assessing the performance and success of business enterprises, that this information is indeed requested by analysts in corporate earnings calls, and that upon the release of the information, albeit sporadically and by few companies, it significantly affects share prices. So there is little doubt that this is the missing information investors need for successful investment decisions. So far, so good; but how will investors receive this information on a regular and uniform basis? Realistically, we suspect, corporate managers—already heavily burdened by extensive statutory disclosure ...