Why I Am Starting Unaudited

Open any Australian annual report and find the page where the auditor signs. It sits near the back, it runs to about two pages, and it is the only part of the document that anybody independent has looked at.

Now count what it doesn't cover.

Not the quarterly. Not the investor presentation. Not the guidance. Not the underlying EBITDA, or the bridge of adjustments that produced it, or the chart on slide fourteen with the arrow going up. The half-year is reviewed rather than audited, which is a lighter thing than most people assume. Everything else carries no opinion from anybody at all.

Those are the numbers that get quoted. The audited figure is the one nobody puts in the headline.

This is not a scandal. It is how the system is built, and there are decent reasons for most of it. What interests me is the gap it leaves, and who is standing in it.

The people who could write this mostly can't

There is no shortage of clever people reading these documents. There is a shortage of clever people free to publish what they found in them.

A covering analyst has a relationship with the company to preserve. Access to management, a seat on the call, an invitation to the site visit, and in many cases a corporate finance division down the hall that would like to pitch for work. None of that makes the analysis dishonest. It makes certain conclusions expensive.

A business journalist needs the phone answered next quarter. The exclusive, the sit-down interview, the tip-off before the announcement. All of it runs on a relationship, and a relationship is a thing that can be withdrawn.

I want to be precise here, because the lazy version of this argument is that everyone is compromised and only the outsider sees clearly. That isn't true and I don't believe it. The constraint is structural, not moral. Good people work inside it every day and produce good work.

But it does mean there are sentences that are true, provable from public filings, and commercially impossible for the people best placed to write them.

I have no access to lose. Nobody returns my calls and I have never needed them to.

The method is unglamorous

Everything I use is already public. Annual reports and half-year accounts. ASX announcements. Notices of meeting. Trust deeds. ACNC filings. ASIC extracts. Court files. Company credit files. Registers that anybody can search for a few dollars.

None of it is secret. It is just unread.

The work is not obtaining the document. The work is reading the note against the comparative, and the restated figure against the original, and the language in the risk section against the language in the results presentation on the same day. Then setting the dates beside each other in order and seeing whether the sequence still looks accidental.

Nothing in that requires a source. It requires patience and a willingness to read the back half of the document, where the interesting material is filed precisely because the front half is where people stop.

What this will and won't be

There is no publishing schedule. I will post when I have found something, and not when I haven't. A masthead that has to produce a piece on Tuesday will produce a piece on Tuesday, and you will be able to tell.

Pieces will be long. Not as a stylistic preference, but because showing the working takes the space it takes, and an argument you can't check isn't an argument.

Every figure will be sourced and the source will be named. If I have inferred something, I will say I have inferred it. If I don't know, I will write that I don't know, which is a sentence that appears far too rarely in financial commentary.

Everybody who appears in these pages gets a right of reply, published in full alongside the original, subject only to law and to the privacy of third parties. I would rather print the response that damages my piece than not have asked for it.

Errors get corrected in public, with the change visible, not swapped in quietly overnight.

And nothing here is financial advice. I hold no licence, sell no research, and have nothing to recommend to you.

About the name

Yes, this masthead is unaudited too.

There is no research committee, no compliance desk, and no issuer relationship to protect. Nobody has signed off on any of this except me.

The difference is that it says so on the front page, rather than in six-point grey type under a chart.

Read closely.