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In the last 20 years, Integrated Reporting (IR) has evolved from an emerging trend into an institutionalised corporate reporting practice. Novozymes (a Danish bio-industrial firm) was the first company in 2002 to issue an integrated report, being followed by Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics firm, in 2003, and the Danish diabetes firm Novo Nordisk in 2004 (Eccles et al., 2011). Even though the early adopters appeared in the 2000s (Eccles & Krzus, 2014), the need to report on a company’s non-financial aspects appeared 25 years earlier, evolving through the ‘triple bottom line’ of sustainability reporting (SR), environmental social and governance (ESG) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting (Gibassier et al., 2019). Around the 2010s, IR rose in various regions and legislations, being consolidated as a practice after 2013 with the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) Framework (Dumay et al., 2016; Gibassier et al., 2019; Rinaldi et al., 2018).

Importantly, accounting is the mirror of all business activities undertaken by enterprises. Financial statements constitute an important source for decision-making by a wide range of internal and external users. The basic concept of accounting reports, which should provide reliable information for users, is the provision of a true and fair view of the situation and structure of assets, financing sources thereof, the structure of the equity capital and the enterprise’s financial state. Needless to say, accounting requires highly qualified expertise from its processors. The relevant accounting frameworks of the Czech accounting standards, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IAS/IFRS) allow for a selection of accounting methods, assessments and estimates of certain accounting phenomena and processes. This approach is further supported by frequent changes of and amendments to accounting standards.

Controlling is a method, which is most often used in contemporary organizations (Bieńkowska & Zgrzywa-Ziemak, 2011; Tworek, 2019c). “Importance of controlling increased sharply” (Guenther, 2013, p. 272), which in practice is confirmed by the growing number of job offers for controllers, and in theory by the number of academic centers dealing with this subject (Schäffer & Binder, 2008). However, it is still considered by many as “a concept that is still subject of many controversies” (Mocanu, 2014, p. 62), and the diversity in the perception of this method is confirmed, among others, by information in the job announcements appearing on the job market (Behringer, 2011). The multi-threaded history of controlling promotes differences in the perception of controlling in the world, as well as the relative diversity of controlling solutions in organizations (e.g. Horvath, 2002).

The paper notices troublesome aspects of compiling industry statistics for the purpose of inter-enterprise comparison in corporate financial analysis. Whilst making a caveat that this issue is unbeknownst to practitioners and underrated by theorists, the goal of the paper is two-fold. For one thing, the paper demonstrates that financial ratios are inclined to frequency distributions characteristic of power-law (fat) tails and their typical shape precludes a simple treatment. For the other, the paper explores different approaches to compiling industry statistics by considering trimming and winsorizing cleansing protocols, and by confronting trimmed, winsorized as well as quantile measures of central tendency. The issues are empirically illustrated on data for a great number of Slovak construction enterprises for two years, 2009 and 2018. The empirical distribution of eight financial ratios is studied for troublesome features such as asymmetry and power-law (fat) tails that hamper usefulness of traditional descriptive measures of location without considering different possibilities of handling atypical values (such as infinite and outlying values). The confrontation of diverse approaches suggests a plausible route to compiling industry statistics that consists in reporting a 25% trimmed mean alongside 25% and 75% quantiles, all applied to trimmed data (i.e. data after discarding infinite values). The paper also highlights the sorely unnoticed fact that the key ratio of financial analysis, return on equity, may easily attain non-sense values and these should be removed prior to compiling financial analysis; otherwise, industry statistics is biased upward regardless of what measure of central tendency is made use of.

In the 1970s, Milton Friedman has claimed that: “the only social responsibility of a company is the use of its resources together with the engagement in businesses that are meant to increase the profits, maintaining the rules of the game. This means to engage into an open and free competition, without any abuse or fraud.” And this is how, starting from the 70s, the “rules of the game” were known in business and the responsibility that triggers the community, a responsibility that the companies fully acknowledge and embrace. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) deals with strategies used by companies to develop their business in an ethical way, to respect the relation with the other members of the society. CSR can involve a range of partnerships with the local communities, investments with a real social impact of the corporations (education, art, and environmental protection), the development of the relations of the companies with the clients, employees and their families.

Incorporating eco-sustainability criteria into the corporate agenda means assigning the natural environment such attributes as power, legitimacy, urgency and proximity. The complexity and interconnectedness of global ecosystems make it difficult for managers to determine specific impacts on these systems; but that is only an excuse for trivial sustainability reporting and dubious triple-bottom-line assessments. And it is the very relationship between accountability in the form of disclosure and ‘shareholder value’ that has kept the business-case controversy alive.

Investiční činnost je v podnikové praxi považována za rozhodující prvek akcelerace ekonomického rozvoje firmy ve všech jejích formách. Současné podmínky pro plánování investičních akcí nejsou vůbec jednoduché a poslední roky končící první dekády 2. tisíciletí přinesly do těchto procesů další prvky nejen nejistoty, ostatně to je pro investování symptomatické téměř vždy, ale byly nastoleny i nové a dlužno říci nečekané skutečnosti, jako např. poruchy na světových finančních trzích s dopady do téměř všech ekonomik světa, vyjma snad skupiny BRICS, kurzové výkyvy a v neposlední době i dluhové krize rozkolísávající i dosud stabilní ekonomiky.