Voluntary and mandatory reporting: a continuum of disclosure

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to open a debate on the interrelationship between categorisation, labelling, disclosure and enforcement. The extant literature on the accounting reporting environment explores the provision of both mandated and voluntary disclosures. Often disclosure is defined in a less than rigorous manner, mislabelled, misclassified and uses a strict dichotomy that limits information fineness.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors advance a non-dichotomous continuum of disclosure from voluntary and innovative at one end of the spectrum, to mandatory at the other, that helps reduce mislabelling and miscategorisation.

Findings: Firms’ voluntary disclosures cannot be properly interpreted without reviewing their interrelationship with mandatory disclosures and vice versa. Definitions of voluntary disclosure that have been used in empirical studies are examined, including the mislabelling and misclassification of voluntary disclosures and the authors provide examples of truly voluntary and innovative disclosures by companies.

Originality/value: This paper constructs, and provides evidence consistent with, a reporting continuum rather than the dichotomous disclosure measure that dominates decades of prior literature.