Financial Reporting on the Internet and the Practice of Croatian Joint Stock Companies Quotes on the Stock Exchanges

In the last ten years, the Internet and applications of it have been increasingly widely employed in modern business operations. In developed countries, the Internet is used with increasing frequency for financial reporting. And accordingly a large amount of academic research has been done into the area. Since no such research has yet been carried out in Croatia, it is a research area that is undoubtedly of interest. This investigation was carried out on a basic sample of 38 joint stock companies quoted on Croatian bourses, the shares of all of them being actively traded. The results showed that twenty of the companies made use of Internet financial reporting and eighteen had no such practice. Companies that use Internet financial reporting on the whole publish the annual reports together with the reports of their auditors. In addition, most of the companies use the PDF format for the reports that they publish. Empirical data show that the firms that use Internet financial reporting are on the whole larger and more profitable, and that their shares are more active on the bourses than the shares of companies that have no such reporting practice. Also established was a statistically significant propensity among financial institutions to use Internet reporting. Joint stock companies in the tourist sector were shown not to have a propensity for Internet financial reporting. Bearing in mind the expected growth of GDP, the growth of the capital market, with the constant growth in the number of Internet users, investment in financial reporting on the Internet could be a useful decision for joint stock companies that wish to enhance the transparency of their operations