Accounting Statements Information Relevance and Integrity in a Global Management Environment

“Integrity may be seen as the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions”; There is no information as accessible to internal and external financial analysts and decision makers as financial statements. This type of information is widely accepted as the basis for a whole range of different financial management decisions, both of tactical as well as strategic nature. There have been created a lot of financial statement based analytical instruments to be used in different circumstances regarding return, risk, asset turnover, liquidity, solvency – to name but a few. But to believe that all these instruments are perfectly efficient for any decision requires a big leap of faith. This is due to the wide known aspects regarding financial statements “window dressing” techniques that distort financial information to match some undercover needs of certain company officials. Everybody in the financial management world knows how financial statements could be made to look better, if such a need is to arise. From a management globalization point of view, is this a widely spread practice or it represents just some isolated cases? Do decision makers and investors blindly believe in financial statement information integrity, or they question any piece of information and verify its relevance? Does financial management of global era is that better-off using these unethical practices or it’s just a “matter of perspective”?“Integrity may be seen as the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions”; There is no information as accessible to internal and external financial analysts and decision makers as financial statements. This type of information is widely accepted as the basis for a whole range of different financial management decisions, both of tactical as well as strategic nature. There have been created a lot of financial statement based analytical instruments to be used in different circumstances regarding return, risk, asset turnover, liquidity, solvency – to name but a few. But to believe that all these instruments are perfectly efficient for any decision requires a big leap of faith. This is due to the wide known aspects regarding financial statements “window dressing” techniques that distort financial information to match some undercover needs of certain company officials. Everybody in the financial management world knows how financial statements could be made to look better, if such a need is to arise. From a management globalization point of view, is this a widely spread practice or it represents just some isolated cases? Do decision makers and investors blindly believe in financial statement information integrity, or they question any piece of information and verify its relevance? Does financial management of global era is that better-off using these unethical practices or it’s just a “matter of perspective”?