Towards financial sustainability of companies: Issues related to reporting errors

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to analyse the opinion of enterprise representatives upon the risk of errors occurrence in selected areas of accounting. Research presented in this paper explains the view of enterprise accountants upon the risk of errors occurrence, both unintentional and intentional, aimed towards the creation of so called "creative accounting". The research itself, done on a sample of 232 Czech enterprises, was based on questionnaire investigation which focused on perception of problematic areas influencing the quality of accounting information. The obtained set of data was evaluated using descriptive method and mathematical/inference statistics. Special testing was done at hypotheses on concordance of two mean values and at the Friedman test. Evaluation of problematic rates of individual areas of accounting revealed that practically each observed area of accounting is connected with specific difficulties. The major causes of problems are tax impacts, namely in the area of the cost, time differentiation and of revenues and also difficulty in pricing, especially in the area of inventories and fixed and financial assets. High respondents' concordance on rating individual accounting areas as to the risk of an error occurrence was detected. It stemmed from the research that the risk of formation of unintentional errors is subjectively rated as the highest in the areas of conjectural and adjusting items and the lowest at asset and depreciation classification. Rating the space for intentional distortion of accounting statements indicates a very reserved attitude of the respondents. The results have proved that in the respondents' opinion practically all areas of accounting give space for occurrence of errors. The results of the research provided a somewhat different perspective on the issue of accounting errors in comparison with results published by other authors who used objective assessment of error rate as a departure point.