Analysis of opinions issued in comment letters on the term prudence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17524/repec.v9i2.1231Keywords:
Conceptual Structure, Prudence, Financial Information, Comment Letters.Abstract
Since 2001, the International Accounting Standards Board (Iasb) has worked to revise the Conceptual Framework (CF). Therefore, it has issued Discussion papers (DP), aiming to collect the stakeholders’ opinions about different aspects of the CF. One of the aspects discussed is the inclusion or not of Prudence in the CF. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the opinions issued in the comment letters in response to the DPs between 2006 and 2013 about the exclusion of the term Prudence from the CF. The research was undertaken through the content analysis of 420 comment letters forwarded to the Iasb, among which 176 were identified that contain the terms Prudence/Conservatism, 117 of which are in favor of including the term. Among those against the inclusion, the main justification is the existence of conflict between Prudence and neutrality. The respondents’ opinions were also separated per location and interest groups, showing that the European respondents are more favorable to the inclusion of the term, while Anglo-Saxon America defends it least. What the interest groups is concerned, the group that was most in favor of the insertion of the term were the Preparers, while the Financial Institutions were the most unfavorable agents. Using Kappa Analysis, it was observed that the level of agreement among the respondents’ opinions indicates weak agreement with the total number of samples, suggesting that further debate and reflection on the theme is needed.References
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