Accounting Standards and Theory

Research Based Case Study and Report: Financial Reporting Disclosures in the Australian Corporate Sector

As a new accounting graduate, you have just joined the financial reporting unit of a listed company* when your manager, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), approaches you with your first task.

In their last meeting, the Board of Directors of your company discussed the importance of ensuring that their financial reports meet the objective of general purpose financial reporting and qualitative characteristics of useful financial information as outlined in the IASB September 2010 ‘Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting’ (CF). Board members are concerned about the company’s reputational standing in the market relating to deviations from these objective and qualitative characteristics, specifically in Property, Plant and Equipment (PPE).

Therefore, the Board decided to have a review of the relevant disclosures in the company’s latest annual report pertaining to PPE and whether these disclosures are aligned with the CF’s objective and qualitative characteristics.

Required:

Based on the Board’s decision, the CFO asks you to draft a business research report addressed to the Board of Directors on the following:

1. Explain in your own words the objective of general purpose financial reporting and the qualitative characteristics of useful financial information according to The Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting (covering OB1-OB21 and QC1-QC39) (10 marks).
2. Critically analyse to what extent the latest annual report of your company meets the disclosure requirements for PPE as per AASB 116 (10 marks).
3. Based on your findings in part b, critically analyse to what extent the disclosures on PPE satisfy the fundamental and at least one of the enhancing qualitative characteristics of useful financial information (10 marks).
4. Based on your findings in part c, critically discuss to what extent the disclosures on PPE align with the objective of general purpose financial reporting and, as a conclusion, recommend actions for improvement (10 marks).

Accounting in Organisations and Society

*You need to choose a suitable company by yourself from: http://www.marketindex.com.au/asx200

1. is constituent of the S&P/ASX 200 index;
2. published audited annual reports for the year ended 30 June 2016in English, fully complying with IAS/IFRS or AASB; and
3. does NOT belong to the financial sector.

You are required to follow the detailed instructions on the next page.

Research Based Case Study and Report
Instructions

Formal requirements:

Structure: Include your own designed report cover page (not to be confused with the assessment cover sheet as described in unit guide, the assessment cover sheet is NOT required for this session), a table of contents, an executive summary and a list of references. You may include an appendix if necessary.

ACC00132-2017-2 Taxation Major Assignment

Length: The minimum total word length of the assignment is 1,500 and the maximum total word length is 1 600 words. Cover page, table of contents and appendices will not be counted in the word count. Please write the number of words used in the assignment after the table of contents.

Font/print: The assignment should be one and a half spaced in ‘Times New Roman’ font type and font size 12.

Referencing: You are expected and required to use references to support your report, for example, accounting standards and other reporting guidelines, journal articles and other academic literature. Any sources of information that you have used must be referenced using the Harvard Referencing System (click to download).

Plagiarism:It is extremely important that you are familiar with the university policy on Academic Honesty (Plagiarism) (click to view the policy online).

Marking Guide:

• This assignment is weighted with 15% of your overall grade.
• Your assignment will be marked according to the following criteria(60 MARKS in total):
  • degree to which it follows the conventional structure of a business research report (5 MARKS);
  • accuracy of technical content(40 MARKS; for detailed allocation see topic sheet);
  • quality of the general written expression (spelling, grammar and appropriate tone)
    (10 MARKS);
  • correct referencing(5 MARKS).
• Guidance to the answer will be provided at the time of feedback.