Ahead of this year's reporting season, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has called on preparers and auditors to improve the quality of disclosures in annual reports.

FRC director Roger Marshall has set out a series of 'calls to action' based on feedback received on the regulator's thought leadership paper Thinking about disclosures in a broader context.

These include making sure disclosures focus on information which is relevant to investors, and that core information is kept separate from supplementary material that is only required to meet the needs of a wider stakeholder group. The FRC says that some of this supplementary information might be better placed outside the annual report, where this is permitted.

In addition, the FRC wants to see immaterial information excluded, and says annual reports should avoid boilerplate language and focus on entity specific disclosures. Related information should be linked, in order to tell the story of a company.>

The FRC says a recent speech by Hans Hoogervorst, chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), Breaking the Boilerplatemirrors its views, and goes on to make a number of recommendations it would like to see IASB adopt. These include developing a disclosure framework that considers disclosures in the financial report as a whole, defines the boundaries of financial reporting, and develops placement criteria. The regulator also says IASB should reduce the use of magnitude terms in IFRSs, such as 'significant', 'key' and 'critical', and define them more clearly.