Hierarchy of qualitative characteristics of financial statements of enterprises during insolvency proceedings

Abstract

According to IFRS, if financial information is to be considered useful to users, it must have certain quali- tative characteristics, such as relevance and faithful representation. Complementary features are compa- rability, verifiability, timeliness and understandability. These features are designed to meet the infor- mation needs of the users who are indicated by IFRS as priority groups when high quality of financial statements needs to be ensured. Bankruptcy proceedings create new groups of stakeholders who have specific information needs. In this article, an assumption was made that the loss of the ability to continue operations and the provisions of the Bankruptcy Law in Poland may determine the information needs of the main users of the financial statements of a company in bankruptcy, and thus affect the hierarchy of quali-tative features of the financial statements. In the case of bankruptcy, the stakeholders that use information contained in financial statements are primarily the court, judges, commissioners, trustees and creditors. The purpose of this paper was to determine the hierarchy of the importance of qualitative features of financial statements, specific to insolvency proceedings. In order to fulfill this goal, questionnaire surveys were car-ried out among specialists in the field of bankruptcy. The methods of mathematical statistics were used, which helped in the interpretation of the obtained results. A hierarchy of qualitative characteristics of fi-nancial statements specific to the insolvency proceedings was built as a result of the conducted research. Despite the specificity of bankruptcy proceedings, the opinions of bankruptcy specialists indicate a differ-ent, though partially similar, approach to the one presented in the IFRS Conceptual Framework. As the most important qualitative characteristics of financial statements, bankruptcy specialists indicated three: understandability, faithful representation and relevance. In their assessment, the least important qualitative characteristic of financial statements is comparability of financial data between entities. The significance of differences in the assessment of individual characteristics was shown in the study.