Grant Thornton Survey: Financial Statements Are Still Too Complex for the Average Shmo Investor

That’s right! Way too complicated. GT’s survey states that 73% of the finance bigwigs surveyed believe financial statements are too complex for the average investor to understand. That’s bad because even more respondents (82%) said that financial statements should “be prepared to meet the needs of the average investor”.
Strangely, this survey’s respondents, “CFOs and senior comptrollers”, are directly responsible for the still-too-confusing financial statements. Unless, of course, everyone that responded to this survey already has easy-to-understand financials and thus, is thinking, “NMFP”.
Also, average investor is not explicitly defined which doesn’t help us put the survey in context. So we’ll put it out there that if “average investor” is anything remotely similar to the “average American”, the solution to this whole problem may be to get Fisher-Price and reality TV producers involved.
Nearly three-quarters of senior financial executives say financial statements too complex for investors [Press Release]