CRE šalių įmonių finansinių ataskaitų palyginamumo tyrimas

Abstract

The last decade has revealed significant changes in regulation of corporate financial reporting, its content, form and other characteristics as well as strengthening efforts to ensure disclosure of more comparable and therefore useful information to the various stakeholders. Analysis of scientific literature revealed that comparability is identified as one of the main qualitative characteristics of financial information. In practice, comparability is accomplished when financial information may be usefully compared among companies and over the time. However, comparability as such is not a common object of scientific research. Analysis of comparability is often matched with assessment of accounting harmonization in most of the previous research. Moreover, comparability is viewed as an inevitable outcome and/or measure of the accounting harmonization. This research differs from previous research in a way that it analyses comparability in relatively stable period of accounting harmonization of chosen countries. It is also aimed to assess if and to what extent users of financial information shall be able to compare companies’ financial information across CEE countries. To conduct a research a total of 56 companies from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary have been chosed and their financial reports for years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013 have been analyzed in terms of technical and content comparability. To assess the technical comparability such criteria as reporting currency, reporting language, financial year, level of rounding and applied accounting standards have been examined. Content comparability has been conducted by analyzing variations in names as well as choice of alternatives to present information in balance sheet, profit and loss statement and cash flow statement. The results of research revealed that eventhough de jure accounting harmonization is fully in compliance in Central and Eastern Europe countries, de facto harmonization is not. There are many differencies in the way financial statements are presented. Assesment of technical comparability identified that differencies among companies in terms of financial year end and rounding of amounts are insignificant for the users; therefore comparability of financial information is possible. However analysis of reporting language revealed that about 10 % of all companies disclose their information in national language only. Moreover, on average 45.6 % of all companies presented their financial statements in national currency only. W e suggest that the last two criteria are the most important to users, who are seeking to make a cross-country comparison of companies. Therefore we conclude that overall technical comparability of financial stetements is only partialy possible. Analysis of content comparability of financial statements also revealed differencies in all criteria. However we acknowledge that such differencies are related to choices offered in IFRS and may be justified by willingness to disclose true and fair view of companies’ financial results and position. To sum up, conducted analysis revealed that comparability of financial statements in CEE companies has either remained the same or improved over the time and is possible according to all assessed criteria except reporting currency and language. Results of the conducted analysis support statements of other researchers that comparability of information disclosed in companies’ financial statements shall not be taken for granted. Users of such information shall use it with precaution. Moreover companies use information disclosure as a strategic tool not only to manage comparability of their information but also cost of capital, etc.