How uniform is financial reporting in Germany? The example of foreign currency translation

Abstract

In many standard textbooks on comparative international accounting, a separate chapter is devoted to classification models of national financial reporting systems. Typically, the authors of ‘international accounting classification models’ not only organize national financial reporting systems into certain groups and assign descriptive labels to these categories. Rather, they also tend to draw analogies with the disciplines of the natural sciences so as to justify the methodology which underlies their theoretical constructs. The validity of these methodological claims is indirectly being examined in this paper, which argues predominantly from an empirical angle. The focus of the essay is on the notion - usually advanced by the authors of the models under discussion - that German financial accounting practice can be described as ‘uniform’, thus forming a contrast to the ‘fair-judgemental’ approach to financial reporting which is commonly held to prevail in the United Kingdom. In order to test these propositions, the accounting policies in the area of foreign currency translation in the consolidated accounts of a sample of British and German chemical companies are subjected to scrutiny.