Government withdraws new reporting regulations

The Government has announced that it has withdrawn the proposed secondary legislation laid in July covering the Audit & Assurance Policy, the Resilience Statement, the Material Fraud Statement and enhanced reporting on distributions.

This has come after consultation with companies raised concerns about imposing additional reporting requirements at this time. Instead, the Government has said that it will pursue options to reduce the burden of red tape on businesses through simplifying and streamlining existing reporting to ensure the UK is one of the best places in the world to do business.

The Government’s statement also says that it remains committed to wider audit and corporate governance reform, including establishing a new Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority to replace the existing Financial Reporting Council and will bring forward legislation to deliver these reforms when Parliamentary time allows.

The full statement is available here.

The FRC has not yet commented on this announcement and so it is currently unclear what this means for the proposed changes to the UK Corporate Governance Code. We will provide further updates in due course.”