Disclosure of Year 2000 Issues in Corporate Financial Reports

The Year 2000 represents a significant challenge for many organizations. Financial report users, which include investors,creditors, suppliers, customers, employees, as well as others,have an interest in knowing how organizations are dealing with the Year 2000 issue. There could be significant negative consequences for organizations that fail to properly address the Year 2000 issue. Public corporations that have material issues associated with the Year 2000 issue are required by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose specific information in their annual financial reports. This paper introduces the Year 2000 issue and reviews the development of public corporation annual report disclosures that are required and recommended by the SEC. The annual reports of 51 companies, which had fiscal years ending in the last half of 1998, were selected from the S&P 500 and were examined for the quality and quantity of Year 2000 disclosures. While all of the companies examined provided some Year 2000 disclosures, very few of the companies provided all of the required and recommended practices set forth by the SEC and some appeared to report in a severely deficient manner.