Communication, Corporate Annual Reports And Perception Engineering

Emerging sensitivity of accountants to the role of communication and perception engineering Communication is an important component of how accountants spend their time. In addition to the involvement of accountants with traditional accounting, they also spend considerable time in meetings with clients and colleagues, in writing reports and letters, in interacting on the phone and by e-mails, in reading myriad documents and in supervising others. For most accountants, the communication function in one form or another heavily dominates their time. Perhaps 80 percent of the average day-to-day routine of an accountant is spent on some aspect of communication, either as a preparer or as a user of information. Written and oral, formal and informal communication with clients and colleagues is not a trivial matter. Asking questions, seeking understanding, reading material, imparting knowledge and interpreting information occurs continuously throughout an accountant’s career. Ironically, however, the tenets of effective communication receive much less emphasis during the preparatory and early stages of development of a member of the accounting profession. Indeed, up until the last decade or so, one might have been excused for thinking that osmosis or mimicry were two principal means by which accountants learned how to effectively articulate their thoughts to colleagues, clients and users of accounting information. While this may somewhat overstate the case, the reality is that accountants do not exist simply as technicians to record and summarize. Book-keepers and computer and data processing operators can record routine transactions. Accountants differentiate themselves from technicians per se by being able to analyze and interpret sophisticated commercial and interactive information and by being able to communicate the meaning of this information to others. A major responsibility of an accountant in discharging professional duties is to ensure that the intended meaning of a message sent to others is capable of being received by them with the same understanding. Acting as a mere provider of information is not sufficient. Accountants also have a responsibility to ensure that what they provide is understandable, relevant, and internally consistent within a reporting document, that it is presented unambiguously, and that it is presented so that key points will not be missed. It is not acceptable to users that accountants simply provide information and ignore whether that information is capable of being identified, understood and utilized. Accountants need to become as sensitive to the presentation, understandability and perception-engineering potential of information as they are to the preparation of its content. There are two sources of pressure on accountants to become more involved in communication issues. The first is that external users of accounting information are increasingly busy (or perceive themselves to be so) and desire ‘‘quick