The Importance Of Financial Reporting During Privatization: Turkish Case

Abstract

Privatization has been on a lot of countr ies' agenda, especially for the emerging countries for a long time. In Turkey, as an emergin g country, privatization plan has been a very high priority among the State Budget income items f or three decades. To identify and to explore the accounting role in privatization is the critical issue for the countries under privatization process. In this study, the importance of financial reporting d uring privatization process is examined. The overall responsibility of accounting in privatizati on is to develop investor confidence to channel the flows of funds and to ensure the effective and effi cient use of capital funds. Therefore, without a sound accountancy framework, the privatization proc ess would not generate the desired long term economic, social, and financial development results . Therefore, we analyzed the period of Turkish privatization experience by underlying the importan ce of financial reporting in this process. For this purpose, in the first part of the study, we defined the privatization and argued the positive and negative opinions about it. In the second part, we clarified the role of accounting in privatization process under disclosure, transitional problems, tr aining, valuation problems, and inflation accounting subsections. In the third part, we dis cussed the recent accounting developments which may effects privatization in Turkey. In the fourth part, we summarized the implementation of privatization in Turkey. Then, we mentioned the key issues in privatization process for emerging economies. Based on the Turkey's privatization prac tices, financial reporting has a very important role in the SOE's privatization process. In our poi nt of view, since accounting has an important role in privatization, this role takes place before , during and also after the privatization. It shoul d be taken into consideration that the main objective of privatization is not only to privatize SOE's, but also keep the sustainability of privatized SOE' s. While privatization creates sources for new investments of the governments, it should support t he effectiveness and economics of goods and services in the area of privatization. So the susta inability of privatized companies is very important as well as their sales. All of the above purposes c an be controlled by solely accounting.