UK - The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) has called for the "shroud of secrecy" surrounding pension fund risk to be lifted by FTSE100 companies.

The organisation also warned that only one in 10 of the top hundred companies were transparent about the "sensitivities" of their final salary pension schemes, as suggested in guidelines by the Accounting Standards Board.

David Wood, executive director of technical policy at ICAS, said FTSE100 companies' had failed to make users aware of future changes to a scheme's surplus or deficit.

"This creates difficulty for investors and shareholders who want to understand the overall scale and timing of the potential pension risks faced by companies," he said.

"The shroud of secrecy around pension risks needs to be lifted to improve the quality of information to investors and to help understand future cash-flow risks to companies."

The report said 35 of the companies made no disclosure about the impact changes in actuarial assumptions could have on their defined benefit schemes, while ICAS estimated that deficits already exceeded £53bn across the leading listed companies.

The organisation further called on the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) to make it mandatory for companies to disclose how changes in certain factors impacted their pension funds.

It suggested IASB force companies to take into account price inflation and salary growth, interest rate changes, equity prices, increases in life expectation and real salary growth when compiling data for its annual reports.

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