The Annual Report and Accounts provides an excellent means for enhancing a company's reputation with a variety of interested parties. Surveys have shown, however, that enhancing reputation by this medium is hindered by financially unsophisticated shareholders, employees and other users, having both different information needs and different levels of understanding of the document. The 1989 Companies Act allowed public quoted companies to offer a summarized version of the Report and Accounts. The findings of this research are that few organizations have chosen to issue such a document, and of those that have particular kinds of organization, namely ‘privatisations’ of former state enterprizes and commercial banks, form the majority. The benefits of the legislation have not, therefore, reached as wide an audience as anticipated.