A twenty-two year old graduating from university has never known a day without the Web (other than limitations to their own access). The electronic distribution of information is the de facto method for most purposes. Phone books, newspapers, books, magazines, paper mail – all moving to electronic distribution.

To this day, however, it’s easy to take the position that the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) notes that electronic distribution of financial statements are not the new “original document”, but just “information” over which the auditor has no responsibility. (See https://pcaobus.org/Standards/Auditing/Pages/AI20.aspx)

“Electronic sites are a means of distributing information [my emphasis] and are not "documents," as that term is used in AS 2710 …  [A]uditors are not required by AS 2710 to read information contained in electronic sites, or to consider the consistency of other information (as that term is used in AS 2710) in electronic sites with the original documents”

Where has the last twenty years of electronic reporting taken us? Have we leveraged the thought leadership of groups brought together by the US FASB or the IASC (now the IASB) in their considerations of the benefits of the electronic distribution of business reports? Read the following, and see how two decades of reality have matched up with possibilities and potential:

FASB: BRRP Business Reporting Research Project Electronic Distribution of Business Reporting Information (January 2000)

https://www.fasb.org/brrp/brrp1.shtml

IASC: Business Reporting on the Internet (November 1999)

https://www.icjce.es/images/pdfs/TECNICA/C02%20-%20IASB/C208%20-%20IASB%20-%20Estudios%20y%20varios/BusinessReportingInternet-IASC.pdf

(Note: “At IASB's meeting in May 2001, IASB concluded that the project should be handed over to the International Federation of Accountants, who are working on a similar project. IASB concluded that the project "went further than financial reporting" and "should not be published by IASB but at the discretion of IFAC".)

https://www.iasplus.com/en/projects/completed/fs/project94