Segment Reporting Practices in India: A Case Study of TCS

Segment reporting requires companies especially those which are multi-product and multi-location to disclose their segment-wise operations in their annual reports as well as in their quarterly reports. The users of financial statements have different utilities for the financial information. The users of accounting information are the stakeholders and they are mainly concerned with financial information of various segments of business. The concept of segment reporting in a formalized form is almost 32 years old. It was proposed in 1974 when the Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) of USA issued Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) 14. After, this International Accounting Standards Committee issued IAS 14 reporting financial information by segment in 1981. Both SFAS 14 and IAS 14 were revised to make segment reporting more informative. SFAS 14 was revised by the FASB with the issue of SFAS 131 in 1997, whereas IAS 14 was revised in 1998. Now, several countries through the standards issued by their respective national institutions have made the segment reporting mandatory. AS 17 in India mandates listed and other companies to report their financial information by segments. The present case study highlights the segment reporting of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). How the critical analysis of segment reporting is carried out and how it is useful for the external users? This study develops an empirical proxy for the quality of segment reporting from the data in company’s annual reports. Information about an entity’s geographical and business segments is relevant in assessing the risks and returns of a diversified or multinational entity for which such information is often difficult or impossible to determine from aggregated data.