تاثیرات استاندارد های حسابداری بر ساختار گزارش های مالی
Abstract
1- Introduction
2-Changes in German GAAP enacted by the German Accounting Law Modernization Act
3- Research design
4- Sample selection and statistics
5- Empirical results
6- Conclusions and limitations
References
Abstract
This study investigates whether the 2009 German Accounting Law Modernization Act has affected the reporting and accounting practices of German private firms. In reforming German accounting standards, numerous accounting options were deleted, several accounting rules were transferred from IFRS to German GAAP with some modifications, and disclosure requirements were extended. In our analysis, we examine the changes in financial reporting and their effects on disclosures. We use four financial reporting property measures: discretionary accruals, the correlation between operating cash flow and accruals, the persistence of earnings, and the predictability of earnings. The results reveal no change across all financial reporting properties. Examining disclosure compliance for capitalized development costs and other provisions reveals substantial variation in compliance.
Introduction
Regulators and the accounting community are concerned with how accounting standards should be designed or changed to achieve financial reporting objectives. Higher quality accounting standards are supposed to positively affect firms’ reporting quality and to be of greater value to users of financial statements. The German regulator implicitly acknowledged the growing influence of international accounting standards by enacting the German Accounting Law Modernization Act in 2009 in an attempt to make German GAAP align more closely with IFRS and to improve the information provided in German financial statements as a result. Specifically, modernizing national accounting law should result in a set of rules that is on par with international accounting standards, but more cost-effective and simpler to manage in practice (RegE BilMoG 2008). This study presents the main changes in the accounting rules and disclosure requirements of German accounting law and examines their effects on financial accounting properties. As medium-sized non-listed companies were a target of the German Accounting Law Modernization Act, this investigation focuses on the consolidated financial statements of private firms. However, to exclude the possibility that macroeconomic effects are driving our results, we include as a control group private firms that release their financial statements under IFRS. With no capital market data in our treatment group, measures of reporting properties represent accounting-based measures, which are calculated using only financial statement data. We employ several accounting-based financial accounting property measures that have previously been implemented in prior research and test whether adopting the German Accounting Law Modernization Act had an impact on these measures. All German firms were required to adopt the new accounting standards in the fiscal year 2010. However, the regulator allowed early adoption in 2009 on a voluntary basis