IN JULY 2014, the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) extended the reach of its Financial Reporting Surveillance Programme (FRSP) to include the review of "clean" audited financial statements of listed companies for compliance with the Singapore Financial Reporting Standards (SFRS).

A year later, ACRA published the results of its review of the first batch of statements.

The results were not pretty. Of the 49 listed companies reviewed, only 12 (that is, barely a quarter) showed no material non-compliance with the accounting standards. There were four instances of severe non-compliance, 54 instances of other non-compliance, and 74 areas for improvement.