At the heart of the current debate about corporate reporting is a paradox. All around the world, people argue that corporate reporting is no longer understandable. And all around the world, there has probably never been so much corporate information published in both such a reliable and sophisticated form. And that itself may be the problem. The sheer scale of information can be overwhelming.

In August, Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US regulatory body, put his finger on the worries. He was speaking to the newly set up Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting, the body charged with looking at complexity in financial reporting. There is an irony here: the committee was created under the aegis of the controversial Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which arrived in the aftermath of the Enron scandal and is itself blamed for more corporate reporting complexity than almost anything else.