透过管理的眼睛：会计报表附注的研究【外文翻译】.pdfVIP

原文： Through the Eyes of Management: A Study of Narrative Disclosures. Accounting narratives are a crucial part of the main financial reporting package. They allow users to assess a businesss performance in the context of a broader managerial discussion of results. All UK companies conventionally produce a chairmans report and the majority now publish some sort of operating and financial review. For more than 20 years, there has been a steady rise in the quantity of narrative information produced. The Company Law Review now recommends that an operating and financial review (OFR) be mandatory in the UK (up-to-now unlike the management discussion and analysis in the US, the OFR has been voluntary). With recent events in the US, such as the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, undermining faith in the financial results, accounting narratives are likely to become ever more important. Despite their importance, as the authors point out, studies into the content of annual report narratives are hard to find. This research thus help to fill an important gap in our accounting knowledge. As the foreword by Mary Keegan, chairman of the Accounting Standards Board demonstrates, the research report is both relevant and topical for both practitioners and academics This report is the result of impressive endeavour. It looks, in detail, at allthe narrative disclosures of 11 listed companies in the food-processing sector (such as Unilever, Cadbury Schweppes and Bernard Matthews). A mixture of manual and computer analysis is used to analyse6,564 text units. As the authors point out this was intensively time consuming - the data collation alone took 6.5 days per company. The main findings are summarized below. The amount of disclosure (perhaps predictably) varies between companies with size being