The Impact of an Accountant's Professional Judgment on the Assessment of Business Value Creation

In the event of new non-standard issues related to the economic activities of an enterprise and its accounting, for which the current national and international regulatory documents do not offer clear norms, the accountant should be guided by his professional judgment. The role of the accountant's professional judgment increases significantly when preparing integrated reporting, which contains more detailed and less regulated information about economic activities and the business value. The article aims to investigate how the accountant's professional judgment affects the assessment of business value creation, the results of which are disclosed in the enterprise's integrated reporting. To achieve this goal, the author carried out an analysis of approaches to interpreting the concept of "accountant's professional judgment," identified the areas of influence of professional judgment on the assessment of business value, and systematized the problems of applying professional judgment by an accountant and ways to solve them. The study's results indicate that professional judgment should be understood as the ability of a person to formulate his own opinion within the scope of his professional activity in a situation of uncertainty based on the use of his acquired professional knowledge and experience. When assessing the creation of business value, the following procedures require the application of the accountant's professional judgment: assessment of internal and external environmental factors and associated risks; evaluation of information requests of reporting users; processing of source accounting data on the creation of business value; transformation of data on the creation of business value for reflection in integrated reporting. By carrying out one or another procedure that requires the application of professional judgment, the accountant can influence the completeness and reliability of reporting data on the creation of business value. His professional judgment allows him to generate the array of reporting data that will meet the information requests of integrated reporting users.