Information lost : a descriptive analysis of IFRS firms' 20-F reconciliations

In December 2007 the SEC issued a formal rule release that allows foreign-private issuers that employ the IFRS to file their financial statements without providing a reconciliation to U.S. GAAP. While the rule change was made after the SEC received and analyzed comments from various constituents on the proposing release, the rule change has not been without controversy and may have argued that the decision was 'premature', based at least partially on evidence of the usefulness of the reconciliations to investors and others. The purpose of our study is to provide a more complete picture of the information that will be lost to investors due to the rule change. Our analysis focuses on the quantitative values included in the reconciliation, a measure of the information formerly required by the SEC. We identify 100 FPIs that filed 20-Fs during 2006 using IFRS. We collect and classify the line-by-line amounts into 22 categories and, using this classification, examine the frequency, magnitude, and sign of the reconciling items. We also sort the FPIs based on market cap (size) and industry and provide the same statistics within those groups. In our analyses we document that there are a few categories where a large proportion of FPIs have reported reconciling items while there are several categories where reconciling items are relatively infrequent. In addition, we observe that size does seem to matter; the frequency, magnitude, and sign of the reconciling items differ across size groups. We also observe differences across industry groups.17 page(s