JSE board chairs’ statements in Top 40 companies’ annual reports are either unreadable or difficult to read, according to a new study.
Long words and sentences, technical language and the use of the passive voice were some of the problems identified by a team from the school of accounting, economics and finance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
The motive for introducing complexity may be to "conceal undesirable information or make the statement less transparent", the academics say in the peer-reviewed journal Risks.