Chancen- und Risikoberichterstattung (English shop)

Preview

Table of Contents, Datei (31 KB)
Extract, Datei (50 KB)

Problem and objective:

At both the international and national level, efforts have been discernible for some years now to supplement traditional financial reporting instruments with instruments for depicting economic uncertainty. With the introduction of the KonTraG, for example, risk reporting became mandatory for large and medium-sized German corporations as early as 1998. In addition, for financial years from 2005 onwards, reporting on opportunities within the management report is required.
Since the legislator does not impose any concrete substantive requirements on the design of opportunity and risk reporting, however, the appropriateness of the statutory provisions on management reporting may be called into question. In this sense, various empirical studies note a growing discrepancy between the theoretical requirements for management reporting and its practical implementation through standard setting and standard application.
The present work takes this as its starting point and examines the question of how the balance sheet, which has traditionally been at the centre of financial reporting, can be supplemented by information on future corporate development together with the associated opportunities and risks in the management report.

Structure of the work:

At the beginning of the work, opportunity and risk reporting is embedded in the context of corporate reporting, taking into account both the development of business-relevant accounting measures and key milestones in the historical development of the management report provisions. Subsequently, a concept of opportunity and risk for management reporting is derived, which serves as the basis for the further investigation.
The next chapter examines various statistical location and dispersion parameters of a probability function with regard to their applicability in the context of quantitative reporting of opportunities and risks in the management report. The criteria used to assess the statistical location and dispersion parameters are both the requirement of ready comprehensibility for the addressees of the reporting and the unbiasedness of information transmission through the fulfilment of a series of coherence properties.
The following chapter is devoted to the theory of business valuation. The focus here is on the effects of opportunities and risks on an investor’s individual decision calculus. This influence can be demonstrated by considering common business valuation models, namely the capitalised earnings method and the discounted cash flow method. Subsequently, it is analysed under which conditions the information resulting from the financial reporting system is compatible with an investor’s business valuation calculus.
The focus of the work is the ensuing discussion of whether the balance sheet can be interpreted as a location parameter of a probability function of future cash flows and thus as a reference value for opportunity and risk reporting. To this end, the applicable recognition and measurement criteria of the balance sheet are examined with regard to their ability to signal target variables relevant to business valuation. Depending on the respective information content of the balance sheet, the content of opportunity and risk reporting can subsequently be specified in order ultimately to avoid redundancies in reporting. Because of the possible combination of reporting instruments from different accounting systems, both the applicable recognition and measurement criteria under the HGB and those under IFRS are considered. The examination of general accounting methods is deepened by a detailed investigation of the realisation principle as well as of the rules for consolidated financial statements from the perspective of uncertainty. The work is further broadened in substance by an analysis of the effects of key changes resulting from the implementation of the German Accounting Law Modernisation Act (BilMoG). In addition to the balance sheet position, alternative reference values for opportunity and risk reporting in the management report are proposed and critically appraised.