Editorial 63 (2) Special Accounting

Accounting is in its essence, the language of businesses and the summary of economic events for the purpose of providing financial information for decision making. It is materialized on the firms’ financial statements, periodically disseminated to a wide diversity of stakeholders, and used as a primary source of financial perceptions and beliefs. As a reflection of businesses’ dynamics, financial information should be useful by observing the fundamental qualitative characteristics -relevance and faithful representation- and the enhancing qualitative characteristics -comparability, verifiability, timeliness, and understandability-. This special issue, on the scope of Accounting and other related scientific fields, such as Auditing and Taxation, was driven by the importance of the financial reporting on the entire decision-making process, and by the role of some Corporate Governance agents, as granters and controllers of information reliability and transparency. The current issue, strongly focused on those scientific fields, can certainly serve as a contribution for theory and practice, underlining some of the old and current paradoxes, and driving readers into future directions and challenges. The organization of a special issue is always an interesting challenge. It is based on the desire to capture and integrate in the special issue the best and the latest developments occurred in a particular scientific field. Indeed, it is our conviction that we have clearly achieved that goal by providing readers with a set of original and useful papers.