A prática da evidenciação de informações avançadas e não obrigatórias nas demonstrações contábeis das empresas brasileiras

Abstract

In order to ensure the quality of information issued by Brazilian enterprises, legislators and regulatory agencies are making efforts to determine the set of information that should appear in the financial statements. However, not all of their recommendations are obligatory, turning this into a matter of company ethics and corporate responsibility. In this paper, the authors attempt to answer the following question: To what extent do Brazilian corporations follow the recommendations on advanced and non-obligatory information disclosure, which is not considered in traditional financial statements. Using the content analysis technique, we studied 95 companies' financial statements for the fiscal year ended 12/31/2002. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for data processing and analysis. We observed that only six out of twenty-one disclosure items under analysis were observed by more than 50%, which indicates that the Brazilian enterprises still have a long way to go regarding transparency and quality in the disclosure of their accounting information.