国际财务报告标准和专家对披露质量的观点外文翻译.docVIP

外文文献翻译 原文： International Financial Reporting Standards and Experts’ Perceptions of Disclosure Quality From 2005, over 7,000 listed ?rms in the European Union and many more around the world will have to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The mandatory adoption of IFRS has been motivated by the need to ensure greater comparability and a higher transparency and quality of ?nancial reporting across the EU member states (see EC Regulation No 1606/2002). This key step on the road towards a global set of uniform accounting standards has inspired other standard setters around the world, such as the Australian Accounting Standard Board (AASB), to adopt IFRS alike. However, the jury is still out on the desirability of such a signi?cant switch of accounting regime. Despite general concerns about the abolition of local accounting standards customized towards the needs of a particular institutional environment (e.g., Schildbach, 2004), there is still considerable debate about the expected quality of ?nancial statements prepared under IFRS standards, both in practice and academia. Consider the prominent example of the French Premier Jacques Chirac, who expressed ?rm resistance to the adoption of IFRS (Accountancy Age, 2003). Academics also present different views on the quality of the ?nancial statements of ?rms adopting IAS/IFRS. Most notably, Ball et al. (2003) illustrate, in the case of four East Asian countries, that adopting ‘IAS-type’ accounting standards will not necessarily lead to higher quality reporting in the presence of lax enforcement mechanisms and strong adverse reporting incentives. Similarly, other studies have revealed severe compliance problems, particularly in the early stage of IFRS (e.g.,Cairns, 2000), thus questioning the transparency of such ?nancial reports. In order to assess the transparency and quality of IAS/IFRS as compared to local GAAP and/or U.S. GAAP ?nancial statements for a large and representative set of ?rms, other ava