Abstract
The qualitative characteristics of accounting information presented by financial-accounting reports represent a concept which was subsequently introduced in the national legal accounting framework and, as a rule, the national conceptual frameworks represent the documents by means of which these quality criteria are established. At a worldwide level, there are more international or national organisms that have an important role in the elaboration of accounting standards in general and more specifically in the formulation of qualitative characteristics of financial reporting. We find two important ones among them, and these are: International Accounting Standards Board, which creates and promotes International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and Financial Accounting Standards Board, which elaborates Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP). However, at the level of each country a standardizing authority decides the rules for producing the financial reports and the qualitative characteristics that must be respected by the information contained in these documents. In this context, this paper aims to present a few general considerations concerning the treatment of the qualitative characteristics of the financial-accounting information in different accounting systems, such as the American one, or the British, French, German, Romanian ones, with insistence on the international approach to qualitative characteristics.
Highlights
Economic organisations produce financial-accounting information which is made available to the users
In the present paper we will focus on the type of accounting information that must strictly comply with certain rules, that is the formalized one which is most often presented by the so-called financial statements
When we approach the concept of accounting information quality we must take into account that this type of information must respect a series of characteristics so that, just as in the case of a commodity or service, it should be useful to the representatives of accounting information demand
Summary
As we have previously mentioned, the two essential qualitative characteristics established by IASB are relevance and faithful representation. The reporting of a new production or sale segment can affect the evaluation of the risks and opportunities the entity confronts with, no matter the importance of the results obtained by the new division in the reporting period In other situations, both the nature and the materiality are important. The information included in financial reports must be complete, given certain limits, both considering its materiality (or physical aspect) and the costs involved (the financial aspect) It must include all the descriptions and explanations which are necessary for the user to understand the depicted phenomenon. Exact representation does not involve exactness in all respects This means that the financial information that is free from error represents an item of information that describes a phenomenon without errors or omissions, so the process used to produce the information is selected and applied to the capital without any errors (IASB, 2011, IFRSs)
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