Australian companies again are at it with carefully constructed slants on their results.

As a result, transparency of disclosure is suffering.

A year ago they were telling us they couldn’t talk about the outlook because of “headwinds” (a favourite of analysts everywhere as well) or “low” or “no” visibility (the future is so confused, we could all fail, etc, etc).

Given the GFC and the uncertainty of the recession, that was understandable.

A year on Australia has escaped recession and corporate earnings are recovering and the outlook is more certain.

And despite the improvement this reporting season, there are more gold-medal efforts at massaging the message, and it’s on both sides of the ledge, good and bad.

For example, it’s what they don’t say: the Commonwealth Bank never referred to its $2.9 billion interim cash profit as a record, which it was. And in its first-quarter trading update this week, Westpac didn’t highlight the fact that the $1.6 billion in cash earnings was also a record.

This morning, AMP and Qantas posted new takes on the corporate slither.

But the gold-medal effort so far comes from the country’s biggest toll road group, Transurban, its management and board.

Transurban yesterday tried to tell us that its “proportional profit” was $334 million.

Transurban Group (TCL) today announced its financial results for the six months ended 31 December 2009. The group reported proportional EBITDA of $331.2 million, an increase of 16.5% on the prior corresponding period. After adjusting for one-off items, the group’s underlying proportional EBITDA increased 12.4% on the prior corresponding period.

There’s no such thing as proportional profit, EBITDA, EBIT, NPAT It’s a fiction, a figment of the fine minds at Transurban.

In fact, the company’s statutory profit was just over $54 million.

Transurban claimed a share of before-tax earnings from its various tollroads around Australia and overseas, regardless of whether they made a loss.

It’s a crock, Transurban knows it and CEO Chris Lynch would not have been allowed to get away with such rubbish at his old employer, BHP Billiton.

And the board is foolish for allowing it to be published. In fact, the board should have known better, starting with chairman David Ryan, of ABC Learning fame.

Bob Edgar, the chairman of Wesfarmers, is a director, as is experienced corporate undertaker (sorry, receiver) Lindsay Maxsted. They all know the dangers of companies booking paper profits.

Edgar and the board of Wesfarmers wouldn’t allow it to happen at that company, so the question has to be asked, who signed off on this statement released yesterday, especially the attempt to spin the profit announcement.

The company didn’t receive the actual share of its associates. It’s just a collection of accounting book entries, much the same way as investment banks and other booked profits from rising property and other values before the crash; it is accounting hot air.

In fact, if Transurban didn’t have such high-class assets (the MS in Sydney, the M7 in Sydney (50%), Citylink in Melbourne), you might wonder if an ABC Learning accounting moment had happened.

Transurban is under pressure from two Canadian retirement funds, who made a now-rejected takeover offer last November. The Australian Future Fund has expressed interest in joining the bid, if it its renewed. So Transurban is spinning its results to impress investors.

But its not just one company, many others have tried to push the line that underlying profit is somehow more accurate than the after-tax profit or unadjusted profit (even operating profit).

For example, this morning The AMP told us that:

“AMP Limited today announced an underlying profit of $772 million for the full year 2009, down five per cent on 2008.

“Underlying profit is AMP’s key measure of profitability as it removes investment market volatility, and is the earnings base used to determine AMP’s dividend to shareholders.

“Net profit attributable to shareholders was up 27 per cent to $739 million compared to the full year 2008, reflecting improved investment returns.”

Well, strike me a lucky. A company involved in the stockmarket, with its ups and downs stripping out “market volatility” to produce an earnings base. And who determines this volatility; is it all rises and falls, not matter how big or small?

Don’t market movements play a big role in determining if investors, whose money the AMP manages, make money or lose it?

Notice that the underlying profit was down but the net profit was up because of investment gains. Both should be used. Investment companies have to take the good with the bad, especially when they are booking paper gains and losses. These have to be made very clear.

The reason for the difference is that in 2008 the “market adjustment” was a negative $226 million, 95% more than the negative $13 million in 2009.

But Qantas topped that by issuing a nine-page commentary that didn’t mention the after-tax profit.

The release started: “Qantas today announced a statutory profit before tax (PBT) of $90 million for the six months ended 31 December 2009.

“The statutory result was in line with guidance, provided in December 2009, of between $50 and $150 million.”

There was also a lot of talk about profit before tax.

The after-tax profit wasn’t in the statement and the fact that no interim dividend will be paid wasn’t mentioned until the last paragraph of those nine pages.

After-tax profit was $58 million. For a company as big as Qantas, that’s tantamount to a loss.

And ConnectEast didn’t even mention its bottom line in the media statement, which was a loss of $43 million. The loss was mentioned in an early paragraph in the directors’ report.

ConnectEast did mention  earnings before interest, tax depreciation and amortisation  (EBITDA) and before repairs and maintenance provision, which was $60.3 million. Is that now EBITDABRMP?