An Analysis of the Content of Corporate Submissions on Proposed Accounting Standards in the UK

Abstract

In this paper, ‘content analysis’ is used to investigate corporate submissions on proposed accounting standards on two levels. First, the written submissions of companies on 28 of the first 31 UK Exposure Drafts (EDs) are examined in detail for any economic or political references. A moderate level of evidence is found to support the hypothesis that some potential economic and political consequences of ED proposals are a major interest of corporate management. The second ‘content analysis’ endeavours to identify the relative significance to corporate management of 27 EDs by simply comparing the absolute and relative numbers both of respondents and also of lines in their ‘comments’. This approach could be used to derive ‘weights’ for analytical models that consider the economic and political consequences of groups of ED ‘comments’ together. It is found that there are statistically significant high positive correlations between the results of the two content analyses. That is, EDs that in their ‘comments’ received the most (least) frequent references to economic and political consequences, also tended to be the most (least) significant in terms of volume of submissions. This indicates that the EDs included in the study were remarkably consistent in their overall economic and political impact on corporate commentators.