Annual Reporting Practices: Information about Human Resources in Corporate Annual Reports in Major Swedish Companies

In this article the aim is to report from two empirical studies of annual reporting of intellectual capital (IC), with particular emphasis on human resources (HR) in Swedish companies. The studies were made on the largest Swedish companies on the stock market's A‐list, during the years 1990, 1994 and 1998. The material used was the external annual reports. In the studies we wanted to assess the extent to which large companies are publicly reporting their IC. The research aimed to investigate the reporting practices in Swedish companies. The research question was to determine if company representatives' desire to make HR more transparent is merely an expression that is not supported by real conviction. The studies showed that there is a very low share of information disclosed about human resources in the corporate annual reports. A tendency to increase was evident, but it is, on average, below 4%. None of the 18 largest companies were above 7%, which reveals that there is a lack of good examples to be found in this group of companies and very little changes had taken place during the past 10 years. It must be concluded that a great deal is often said about the importance of having a more transparent HR or human capital in companies, but the evidence suggests that in the real world this is still not the case.