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The IUP Journal of Accounting Research and Audit Practices:

Narrative Disclosures in Corporate Annual Report: A Critical Review of Literature

Article Details

Pub. Date	: Apr, 2019
Product Name	: The IUP Journal of Accounting Research and Audit Practices
Product Type	: Article
Product Code	: IJARAP11904
Author Name	: Lokanath Mishra and P K Haldar
Availability	: YES
Subject/Domain	: Finance
Download Format	: PDF Format
No. of Pages	: 13

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Abstract

Narrative disclosure in corporate annual report is perhaps more useful to the users who lack the tools, expertise and resources needed to garner and interpret exceedingly complex quantitative corporate information. Corporate reporting is no longer limited to only balance sheet and income statement, but also includes a wide range of narrative disclosures relating to the unconventional assets, value drivers and issues of competitive advantages of the new economy business for catering to the needs of various stakeholders. As a result, corporate reports have now become longer and richer in content and context. However, in the absence of any specific format or any agreed conceptual framework or any common policy of what to include and what not, the growth is becoming multidimensional and even seems unbounded, making the narrative parts uncomparable with each other even for technical experts. The present study hence aims to review all the available studies conducted on the various dimensions of narrative accounting practices in India and abroad and find the valuable research gap, which may help to augment future studies in this area.

Description

Accounting is best understood as ‘the language of businesses’. Ever since the development of accounting as a medium of recording and reporting business transactions, it has been communicating results of the past performance of the business to its users. But there is a growing demand from the stakeholders for disclosure of more relevant information so that they can understand the company’s operation in more credible way. They are interested not only in information relating to past, but also want to know about the present and future. Apart from that, they are also interested in knowing the things that cannot be quantified and how companies assess their performance against internal targets. Users of financial statement thus prefer to have more possible imaginative and informative ways to communicate real insights of the business.