The True and Fair View Requirement in National Accounting Regulations of EU Member States

The acceptance of true and fair view, a concept of Anglo-Saxon origin, in European countries took place after the accession of Great Britain and Ireland into the European Union, in 1973, when the concept was introduced in the Fourth Directive. The Fourth Council Directive, adopted in 1978, presented the procedures for accounting valuation, the requirements for the quality of financial information, the generally accepted accounting principles and the format of the financial statements, true and fair view being among the requirements that affected the financial statements presentation. Through this paper we aim to identify whether true and fair view existed before it was presented in the Fourth Directive, the way it was presented therein and the way it was implemented into the national regulations of Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Croatia. The study is built as a follow-up of three studies (Nobes, 1993; Aisbitt & Nobes, 2001; Dragneva & Millan, 2002), that traced the implementation of the concept in the national accounting regulations of the other twenty European states. This paper considers the situation for the remaining eight countries and puts them in the context of the earlier twenty. Through content analysis and literature review, this paper looks first at signifiers used in the Fourth Directive, afterwards at the signifiers in national regulations, finishing with the implementation of the “true and fair view override” in national accounting laws. Taking into account the replacement of the Fourth and Seventh Council Directives with Directive 34/2013, we follow the national regulation after the implementation of the latter, in order to summarize the overall perception regarding the role of true and fair view in financial reporting.