小型私营企业的强制性会计信息披露失真外文翻译可编辑Word下载.docx

1、小型私营企业的强制性会计信息披露失真外文翻译可编辑#小型私营企业的强制性会计信息披露失真外文翻译# 外文翻译#Mandatory Accounting Disclosure by Small Private Companies# Material Source:# Forthcoming, European Journal of Law and Economics# Author:# Benito Arru?#ada# This article analyzes how mandatory accounting disclosure is grounded on different ratio

2、nales for private and public companies. It also explores technological changes, such as computerised databases and the Internet, which have recently made disclosure of company accounts by small companies potentially less costly and more valuable, thanks to electronic filing and universal online acce

3、ss to credit information systems. These recent developments favour policies that would expand the scope of mandatory publication for small companies in countries where it is voluntary.They also encourage policies to reduce the costs and enhance the value of disclosure through administrative reforms

4、of filing, archive and retrieval systems.Survey and registry evidence on how the information in the accounts is valued and used by companies is consistent with these claims about the evolution of the tradeoff of costs and benefits that should guide policy in this area.# Mapping costs# Publishing com

5、pany accounts involves substantial private costs. These include the direct administrative cost of preparing and filing the accounts. There may be other less direct costs, as publication may cause a competitive disadvantage for the disclosing firms, which may damage their incentives to invest. A thir

6、d type of private cost is the loss of personal privacy Administrative costs# These costs are not trivial, as revealed by the lack of compliance observed when enforcement is lenient, as in Germany Weilbach, 1991:# 800 or The Netherlands Bolle, 1996. It has been argued that to avoid the costs of manda

7、tory publication some firms are willing to do substantial restructuring Barry, 2006, and publication avoidance has played a role in some massive changes in organisational form Maijoor, 1996. Furthermore, mandatory disclosure may also interfere in the optimal choice of safeguarding instruments Gore,

8、Sachs and Trzcinka, 2004 But the size of these costs is open to question, at least for most firms. First, the direct cost of compliance is small. The cost of preparing the annual accounts is low as the public accounts are now a standard by-product of any accounting software, which is in any case ind

9、ispensable for managerial and tax accounting. Accounting software packages simply reorganize the data and automatically prepare different sets of accounts which follow the different formats required for managerial purposes, tax compliance and, when so required, public filing. A main reason why this

10、holds even for micro companies is that the complexity of tax compliance leads entrepreneurs to purchase all these bureaucratic services, therefore benefiting from specialization advantages and scale economies.Furthermore, the cost of filing the accounts can and should be minimised by extending the u

11、se of new technologies electronic filing, extending the use of simplified accounts and eliminating useless procedures such as notarising the signature of the company representative. In general, given that company accounts are not subject to any substantive review by the registry, it is relatively ea

12、sy to automate the process.# Publishing financial accounts also incurs additional costs for administering and regulating the disclosure, as well as for filing and processing the information. To the extent that these services are financed by the filing firms, most of these costs are the same as those

13、 analysed in the previous paragraph. However, examining their structure is worthwhile because it suggests that even a substantial drop in account publication might reduce costs little for two reasons. First, investments by public registries, to make account filing possible and to manage the informat

14、ion flow, and by private firms, to capture and exploit the information, are mostly sunk costs and therefore irrelevant in the short run. Second, because both filing and exploiting the files offer substantial economies of scale. Therefore, many costs would be incurred anyway to serve the non-exempted

15、 firms and those which voluntarily decide to continue filing their accounts.# Lastly, part of the cost savings obtained by not filing the accounts would disappear, as all firms would be repeatedly required to provide more specific information to different agents. Such demanders of information would

16、not only be their several banks and suppliers this demand could be satisfied by voluntarily disclosing, but also public agencies which would stop relying on the public record of accounts if this became substantially less complete and would start building additional databases as well as enlarging their current demand of information from firms.Of course, national governments could avoid this new demand for information by implementing mandatory disclosure.# Distortion of competition# Pu