About

Much of what moves a listed company’s share price has never been independently audited.

The annual financial statements are audited. Half-year financial reports are audited or reviewed. But quarterly updates, investor presentations, guidance and the underlying EBITDA with its bridge of adjustments often sit outside a full audit opinion.

That is often where expectations move.

The name

This masthead is unaudited too. No research committee, no compliance desk, no issuer relationship to preserve.

The difference is that it says so on the front page rather than in the footnotes.

What this is

An independent Australian publication covering companies, markets, governance and the people who run them. Financial analysis, corporate governance and telecommunications, with detours wherever the filings lead.

It is written from the documents. Annual reports, ASX announcements, company filings, trust deeds, registers, court records, credit files.

Where a number appears here, it came from somewhere. The somewhere is named.

Some pieces are about the arithmetic. More are about the incentives, and about who was in the room.

A recurring column on directors, conflicts, overlapping boards and corporate relationships.

Named after the note in the accounts where all of that is meant to be disclosed.

Right of Reply

Every person and organisation appearing in these pages is invited to respond. Replies are published in full and without editorial amendment, alongside the original piece, subject only to law and the privacy of third parties.

The invitation is not decorative. If there is context that changes the picture, the people who were there are the only ones who can supply it, and this masthead would rather print it than not.

Corrections

Errors are corrected promptly and visibly, with the change noted rather than quietly swapped in. Anyone who finds one is doing the publication a favour.

New analysis by email when there is something worth publishing.

No schedule. No filler.

The editor

Unaudited is written and published by Ryan Tan, a Sydney-based writer.

He spends most of his time in annual reports, ASX announcements and filed accounts. Earlier work in telecommunications and then in commercial collections supplied an unusual second education: what a company's own records disclose about it, and the particular sequence of enquiries that tends to appear on a file shortly before a difficult conversation.

He also hosts The Ryan Tan Show.

The Ryan Tan Show

A long-form interview podcast on Australian law, finance and accounting.

Guests have included Jason Paris, interviewed in his final week as chief executive of One New Zealand, a business Infratil paid $3.4 billion for and rebuilt under him. He circulated the episode to his own network and described the questions as "genuinely thoughtful and challenging."

Also Elvis Sehovic, formerly head of tax and accounting at Retinue, who gave a two-hour account of the rise and collapse of one of the country's fastest-growing accounting firms. The episode ran ahead of the mainstream coverage and has since been cited in it. Nobody else from inside the business has told the story in that detail.

Other guests include a restructuring partner with more than a thousand formal insolvency appointments, a tax lawyer formerly of the ATO's Tax Avoidance Taskforce, the founder of Australia's only dedicated credit repair law firm, and the commercial litigator behind Coffee and a Case Note.

Episodes run ninety minutes to two hours. That is not a production decision. It is how long it takes for somebody to stop giving you the prepared answer.

Unaudited does not provide financial advice. Nothing published here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial product.

Correspondence and confidential material hello@unaudited.com.au