Standard Setting for the Financial Reporting of Religious Business Organisations: the Case of Islamic Banks

Islamic banks have to abide by Islamic principles in all their business transactions. Accounting practices also have to be in conformity with this cardinal rule. Currently almost every Islamic bank sets its own accounting policy through a process which involves in-house religious advisers and the financial auditor of the bank. However, Islamic banks have recently agreed to establish a standard setting body to regulate their financial accounting and reporting. This paper argues that one of the predominant factors which seems to have influenced this decision and the institutional arrangements through which accounting standards will be promulgated is Islamic banks' fear of possible future intervention by their regulatory agencies.     

Corporate Financial Reporting in Nigeria

This paper reports on the extent of financial reporting by a sample of publicly quoted companies in Nigeria. Rather than examine the disclosure of specific items of information, the paper deals with the entire contents of the corporate annual report and highlights its different parts. The index of disclosure methodology is used to describe the trend of reporting practices between 1982 and 1986.     

Canadian Financial Reporting Institutions

The recently published Easy Prey Investors: Why Broken Safety Nets Threaten Your Wealth lambastes virtually every aspect of Canadian financial reporting in exceptionally harsh terms. Although the authors' assertions about the implications of financial reporting violations they have seen are mostly unsubstantiated or overblown, publications like theirs are useful if they stimulate continual, thoughtful consideration of Canada's institutional arrangements. I discuss various methodologies for doing this and present some novel evidence indicating that some of the authors' assertions are simply incorrect. Canada's financial reporting institutions, like all institutions, are not perfect, so we must always listen to their critics' suggestions for reforming them; however, our institutions are in much better shape than Easy Prey Investors asserts.     

Objectives of Financial Reporting

Conceptual framework documents can be evaluated in terms of four criteria: clarity of expression, consistency of assumptions with knowledge of commercial practices and the behaviour of external users of accounting information, internal consistency, and comprehensiveness as a guide to financial reporting practice. On this basis, the Australian Accounting Research Foundation's (AARF's) Statements of Accounting Concepts No. 2 (AARF, 1990a), Objectives of General Purpose Financial Reporting , is found wanting. SAC 2 is inappropriately drafted in terms of normative statements, and incorporates considerable ambiguity because of its allusions to inconsistent objectives without guidance as to weightings or how apparently inconsistent statements might be reconciled. Supporting analysis is rudimentary at best and it relies on an inappropriate use of terminology, while statements lack empirical support and are not linked to any analysis of users' needs for information. Six recommendations for the redrafting of a more narrowly focused SAC 2 (concentrating on annual reports by profit-seeking entities) are presented.     

报表改良

财务报表作为公司对外报告的主要载体,其结构、内容及繁简在国际上充满争议。如何使财务报表及时、准确、有效地给使用者传递公司财务信息,是理论和实务界的共同努力方向。2008年10月16日,国际会计准则理事会(IASB)和美国财务会计准则委员会(FASB)联合发布了《财务报表列报初步意见》(讨论稿)(以下简称《讨论稿》),该《讨论稿》是世界     

Trust and Financial Reporting Quality

Using unique survey data from Great Place to Work® Institute, we investigate the association of intraorganizational trust (i.e., employees’ trust in management) with three aspects of financial reporting: accruals quality, misstatements, and internal control quality. We find that trust is associated with better accrual quality, lower likelihood of financial statement misstatements, and lower likelihood of internal control material weakness disclosures. However, these effects are not uniform across all companies. Consistent with trust improving financial reporting quality through improved information production and information sharing, we find that trust is significantly associated with financial reporting quality in relatively decentralized firms, but not in firms that are relatively centralized. Our results are robust to several analyses that attempt to control for potential alternative explanations.     

Financial Reporting in Europe: Future Challenges

Abstract

A roundtable at the 11th workshop of the European Financial Reporting Research Group (EUFIN) on Friday 4 September 2015 in Paris brought together leading participants in the development and enforcement of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the use of IFRS financial statements to debate the future challenges in European financial reporting. The panellists were Philippe Danjou, a board member of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), Roxana Damianov, team leader for corporate reporting at the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and Jacques de Greling, senior equity analyst at Natixis, vice-chairman of the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies (EFFAS) financial accounting commission, member of the IASB's capital markets advisory group and member of the user panel of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG). The panel was chaired by David Cairns. None of the panellists presented formal papers but instead spoke and debated freely about a range of current and future challenges. Not surprisingly, they focussed on the challenges arising from the use of IFRS in the consolidated financial statements by EU companies listed on EU regulated markets rather than the challenges that might arise from the use of EU or national requirements in non-IFRS financial statements.

This paper provides a synthesis of the panel discussions in the context of the European Commission's evaluation of the International Accounting Standards (IAS) Regulation, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation's (IFRSF) review of its own and the IASB's structure and effectiveness, and the ongoing work of the IASB and ESMA.     

Banks’ Financial Reporting and Financial System Stability

The use of accounting measures and disclosures in banks’ contracts and regulation suggests that the quality of banks’ financial reporting is central to the efficacy of market discipline and nonmarket mechanisms in limiting banks’ development of debt and risk overhangs in economic good times and in mitigating the adverse consequences of those overhangs for the stability of the financial system in downturns. This essay examines how research on banks’ financial reporting, informed by the financial economics literature on banking, can generate insights about how to enhance the stability of the financial system. We begin with a foundational discussion of how aspects of banks’ accounting and disclosures may affect stability. We then evaluate representative papers in the empirical literature on banks’ financial reporting and stability, pointing out the research design issues that empirical accounting researchers need to confront to develop well‐specified tests able to generate reliably interpretable findings. To this end, we provide examples of settings amenable to addressing these issues. We conclude with considerations for accounting standard setters and financial system policy makers.     

Characteristics of Organisations Using an Audit for Interim Financial Statements

This study examines the characteristics of companies that choose to have a full audit of their interim financial statements, as distinct from a review. A cross-section of 252 firms that had submitted interim financial reports to the Australian Stock Exchange were selected from the Business Review Weekly (BRW) list of top 1,000 companies. A direct logistic regression analysis was undertaken to assess whether voluntarily adopting an audit was related to size (assets), leverage, minority interest, profitability, industry, and whether the company had used a Big-6 audit firm. The results indicate that the level of leverage is a significant predictor of companies adopting a review, whereas use of a Big-6 audit firm was associated with conducting an audit. In addition, there is some evidence companies in the financial services industry were positively associated with conducting an audit.     

虚假财务报告现状分析

虚假财务报告的理论界定财务报告是企业向外界传递自身经营活动情况信息的一种载体,是企业对外提供的反映企业某一特定日期财务状况和某一会计期间经营成果、现金流量的文件,包括数据化信息和非数据化信息。数据化信息如资产负债表、利润表和现金流量表中的有关数据,非数据化信     

Financial Reporting and Employee Job Search

We investigate the effects of financial reporting on current employee job search, that is, whether firms' public financial reports cause their employees to reevaluate their jobs and consider leaving. We develop theory for why current employees use earnings announcements (EAs) to inform job search decisions, and empirically investigate job search based on employees' activity on a popular job market website. We find that job search by current employees increases significantly during EA weeks, especially when employees are more mobile and when their information frictions are greater. We also find that employees use EAs to update their expectations about their employers' economic prospects, consistent with learning, and some evidence that positive announcements elicit less search. Our paper contributes to the burgeoning labor and accounting literature by providing among the first evidence closely linking financial reports to employee learning and job search.     

Measuring Harmonisation of Financial Reporting Practice

Many organisations are currently engaged in the process of national and international harmonisation of financial reporting. This paper examines the nature of the harmonisation problem and the possibility of developing a method to quantify the degree of harmony of financial reporting practice. This quantification can be useful in determining problem areas where the degree of harmony is low, and the impact of standards on financial reporting harmony and spontaneous harmonisation, i.e. harmonisation that cannot be attributed to laws, standards or guidelines. Standard setters might use the method to set goals in respect of the required degree of harmony when issuing a standard, guideline or opinion.     

虚假财务报告的审计重点

虚假财务报告包括非故意错报或漏报的错误财务报告和故意不实反映的舞弊财务报告。错误主要包括:原始记录和会计数据的计算、抄写错误,对事实的疏忽和误解,对会计政策的误用。舞弊主要包括:伪造、变造记录或凭证,侵占资产,隐瞒或删除交易或事项,记录虚假的交易或事项,蓄意使用不当的会计政策。对虚假财务报告的审计,应抓住虚假财务报告可能出现问题的环节,重点审计。下面就舞弊的资产负债表、损益表、现金流量表以及财务报表附注的审计重点进行分析。 资产负债表的审计重点对虚假资产负债表的审计,应注重搜集资产负债表以外的经济活动资料,…     

互联网金融征信模式选择

通过分析互联网金融征信对于互联网金融发展的必要性和重要性,提出构建央行牵头的独立、集中、统一互联网金融信用信息数据库的征信模式,实现对互联网金融信息阶段性、有序性、技术性的整合和采集,并在此基础上总结完善我国互联网金融征信的政策制度保障措施.     

Financial Reporting and Supplemental Voluntary Disclosures

A standard result in the voluntary disclosure literature is that when the manager's private information is a signal correlated with the firm's liquidation value, mandatory disclosures substitute for voluntary disclosures. In this paper, we assume that the manager's private information complements the mandatory disclosure and show that the content and likelihood of a voluntary disclosure depend on whether the mandatory reports contain good or bad news. This different information asymmetry produces new, testable implications regarding the probability of and market reaction to voluntary disclosures. We also show that changes in mandatory disclosure regulations can have unintended consequences due to their effects on the manager's willingness to voluntarily provide supplemental disclosures.