What is actually useful in financial statements?

Financial statements represent the accountability of a company’s Board of Directors before stakeholders, especially partners and shareholders. But which data are actually useful for external users? Is it possible to say which is the most important piece of information? Which ones must be improved? The researcher Ismael Heissler, postgraduate student of the Comptrollership and Accounting Postgraduate Program of the School of Economic Sciences of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), intends to answer all these questions in his master’s degree thesis.
The focal point of the thesis is to understand the perception of external users of financial statements. “I have already prepared financial statements and always questioned whether some pieces of information, which demanded a lot of time to be collected, were actually useful,” Heissler says. With that in mind, the researcher expects to receive contributions of Amec’s members, the target users of his study.
Heissler explains that some authors consider that the adoption of the IFRS brought “new” data that are eventually repetitive and disclosed without the necessary careful assessment of their relevance. Ultimately, they bring no significant improvement to the quality of financial statements and push up their disclosure costs.
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