Senior financial executives overwhelmingly think financial statements are too complicated for average investors to comprehend, but the addition of some non-financial key performance indicators to financial reports might be helpful.

However, only about half of the U.S. executives who participated in a recent Grant Thornton survey said they actually provide investors with KPIs that are not already required by accounting or financial reporting rules. A larger number, 69 percent, said companies should consider including KPIs in unaudited supplements to financial statements.

The complexity of financial statements is a well-known problem, agreed Mike Krzus, a partner in the public policy and external affairs group at Grant Thornton, but solutions are elusive. “The complexity reflects reality,” he said.

Accounting principles are difficult to apply, he said, and disclosure requirements are dense. And in many cases companies struggle with overlap among regulatory and accounting requirements, he said. “It’s a complex world with swaps, hedges, and different kinds and different colors of derivatives. The disclosures should reflect the complexity of the business environment and globalization.”

To address the issue, Krzus said public policy makers should take a fresh look at the final recommendations of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting. “It was a diverse group, and it was able to reach consensus on a lot of proposals directed at the SEC and FASB [Financial Accounting Standards Board] to try to improve the nature of the disclosures and the information in today’s financial statements,” Krzus said.

XBRL—the upstart electronic method of tagging financial data that the SEC is phasing in—is another potential complexity buster, said Krzus. “We are trapped in this paper-based paradigm, and it’s hard to read financial statements cover to cover,” he said. “It takes a lot of work to dig out those nuggets and pearls of wisdom, but we’ve got a good start with the phased approach for the tagging of information.”