Obscuring disclosure with
bad format choices
By Dominic Jones, IR Web
Report
OK, here's what we know: Investors mostly access
corporate reporting information online and they
are mostly interested in financial statements.
So why would a company post its financial statements
on the Web in a format that makes it next
to impossible to read or use online?
Clearly they shouldn't, yet that's exactly
what I was presented with during a recent site
review of the IR website of Suez SA,
a large gas and electric utility based in France.
The company has taken its financial statements,
pasted them into PowerPoint... then copied images
of the slides into a word processor document
... then created a PDF document.
The result is that it is impossible for
me to read the financials at 100% magnification
in my PDF reader.
This is shown in the screenshot of the cash
flow statement, which is taken at a resolution
of 1024 x 768, the most common resolution on
people's computers globally according to a July
2005 report by OneStat. In other words,
the image is exactly the size and resolution
as I saw it, or didn't see it, on my
screen.
It's obvious that the above view is illegible.
However, zooming in does not help. Since
the cash flow statement is embedded in an image
in the PDF, magnifying the view simply distorts
the image. This is shown below in the image
of the PDF document at 150% magnification.
Although I am able to read most of the figures,
it is a strain and I have to look carefully.
Some figures are illegible, particularly for
the most recent and most relevant period, which
is reversed out of green. For example, is the
"Cash flow from operating activities"
line for 06/30/05 2,024 million or 2,924 million?
Now let's say I want to enter these figures
into a spreadsheet. I can't except by manually
re-keying all the information. I am prevented
from copying and pasting the figures because
they are embedded in an image within the PDF
file.
All of this simply makes the information
unusable on the Web. It has the same utility
as paper, no more.
Why a company would do this is a matter of
conjecture, but it is probably out of ignorance
of the needs of investors. It's either that
or the company doesn't want you to read
its figures, much less subject them to scrutiny
in a spreadsheet.
In an age when people like the SEC's chairman
Christopher Cox are trying to coax companies
to interactive financials using XBRL,
it is astonishing that practices like this persist.
More astonishing still is that many, many
companies do similar things every day.
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