مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد محتوای اطلاعاتی استاندارد های گزارشگری مالی بین المللی – امرالد 2017

As global stock markets have become increasingly integrated, policy makers in many countries have mandated the use of a common set of accounting standards, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). According to the AICPA (2016), 120 countries require or permit companies to use IFRS in reporting their financial results to investors. Meanwhile United States companies still apply U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Historically, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) required foreign private issuers whose securities were traded on United States markets to provide investors with information about what their financial statements would look like if they had used GAAP in preparing those statements. The purpose of the reconciliation was to provide U.S. investors with financial information on foreign issuers that was comparable to information the investors could obtain for companies in the United States. Debate over the usefulness of the Form 20-F reconciliation, relative to its cost, has been ongoing for some time. For example, in the early 1990s, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange argued that the 20-F reconciliation impeded the competitiveness of U.S. Exchanges (Siconolfi and Salwen, 1992). Beginning in November 2007, the SEC withdrew the reconciliation requirement for foreign issuers whose financial statements are prepared using IFRS (SEC 2007). The withdrawal of the reconciliation requirement raises interesting policy and research questions. From a research perspective, withdrawal offers the opportunity to analyze and evaluate the question whether the costs of reconciliation for affected firms were offset by benefits to investors. Specifically, if the investment community was unable to reconcile GAAP and IRFS reporting on its own—or if the differences between the two sets of standards are substantial—then we would expect analyst forecast errors to increase, and confidence in those forecasts to decline, after the reconciliation requirement was withdrawn. If, on the other hand, the reconciliation provided relatively little important information to the market, perhaps because convergence efforts over the first part of this century reduced the differences between the two sets of standards, then we would not expect to see a meaningful change in either forecast accuracy or uncertainty in the period after the reconciliation requirement was withdrawn.