A study on financial reporting practices of public listed companies in Malaysia / Norhayati Alias

This study empirically examines the annual reports of Public Listed Companies in Malaysia and specifically analyzes listed companies' reporting practices against the requirements stipulated in Malaysian Accounting Standard Board (MASB). Therefore, in an era of globalization, it is pertinent for companies to practice adequate disclosure, transparency and the highest level of corporate governance when reporting their financial transactions. Potential investors need the information to make investment decisions; employees to know about their job security; owners to know about their financial returns and bankers to decide whether die companies can afford to pay their loans. Besides, in practicing transparency, it is also expected that companies would make available their corporate reports through the Internet. This study analyzes the annual report of 100 companies from the main board. These companies covered 10 different industries on the main board, namely, consumer products, construction, finance, industrial, infrastructure, mining, trading/services, properties, plantations and technology. In addition, the analysis for this study was restricted to "descriptive statistics" namely frequency tabulation, means, T-test and correlation. The current research found that the level of disclosure among public listed companies was still low. Although the new Malaysian Accounting Standards was designed to improve the reporting practices of Malaysian companies, the level of disclosure practices was only slightly improved. Companies were still very much influenced by the reporting practices under the previous International Accounting Standards (IAS) requirements. In fact, the use of the Internet as a medium of corporate financial reporting is still minimal.