Exploring the disclosure quality of integrated reporting in India

Information is one of the elementary and important tools assessed by the corporate stakeholders for strong decision making. Further, providing accurate, transparent, and concise report is always a challenging task. In this context, this groundwork explores the advancement of integrated reporting (IR) in India. Moreover, the exploration also focuses on the level of disclosure and quality of reporting through individual parameters of IR, i.e., four guiding principles (GP), eight content elements (CE), and six capitals of the IR system. The analysis selected annual reports of 81 Indian companies for 2020 and 2021 and examined 162 integrated annual reports by employing a scoring system for converting qualitative information in the integrated reports to quantitative data. The study constructed the capital disclosure index (CDI) and integrated reporting index (IRI) to measure the overall quality of IR. Wilcoxon signed ranks test, the sign test and paired sample t-test were employed to capture the trend of the IR. This study found that quality of IRI improved in 2021 compared to 2020; however, the individual items did not show much variation. This research has practical implications for the top management, market regulators and policy makers.