Evaluation of the pre-adoption period IFRS in Vietnam - Difficulties and factors affecting the application of IFRS

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the application of International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) increases the transparency of information in the financial statements of listed companies in Vietnam. The study also seeks to identify firms' motivations for voluntarily adopting IFRS in the pre-adoption period and provides recommendations and solutions on the roadmap for IFRS application in Vietnam. The study utilises logistic and linear regressions to test the hypothetical relations set up in the study. The study was conducted as follows: (1) First, we researched 322 listed companies to grasp the application of IFRS; assessing enterprises’ motivation and readiness to apply IFRS in the pre-adoption period. (2) We continued to investigate 195/322 enterprises surveyed above, divided into 2 groups: already applied IFRS and not yet applied IFRS, using the structural equation modeling (SEM) method with AMOS - SPSS to check whether the application of IFRS increases the level of transparency of information in financial statements, and identify and measure the factors affecting the application of IFRS in Vietnam.