Accounting Standards Compliance: Comparison between Manufacturing and Service Sector Companies from India

The paper aims at identifying compliance level of Indian Manufacturing and Service sector companies with respect to Accounting Standards and possible company attributes affecting the level of compliance. The level of compliance has been determined by calculating Compliance Index consisting of Disclosures required by Accounting Standards in India. Company attributes like size, age, profitability, leverage, audit firm etc. are considered as explanatory factors. The average compliance has been higher for manufacturing companies (73%) as compared to Service companies (69%). Size, Foreign Listing, Audit firm has been found to be significantly associated with the level of compliance in case of Manufacturing companies whereas only size is significantly associated with level of companies in the case of service companies.


Introduction
Financial reporting is the communication of financial information of an enterprise to the external world.Financial information is primarily generated through accounting process.Transparency through better financial disclosures particularly from companies has been consistently demanded by stakeholders.Separation of ownership and management in the corporate form of an organization makes it essential for the mangers to provide adequate and quality information about performance of the company to the shareholders.Disclosure of financial as well as non financial information is essential for reporting performance of an entity.The reporting is done mainly through Annual Report along with other publications like quarterly reports.To standardize the accounting information, business organizations would have to establish certain accounting policies based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).These differ from country to country, depending upon the accounting standards adopted in that country and legal and regulatory environment.
In India, The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has constituted the Accounting Standards Board (ASB) to formulate Accounting Standards (AS).While formulating the Accounting Standards, the ASB takes into consideration the applicable laws, customs, usages and business environment prevailing in India.National Advisory Committee on Accounting Standards (NACAS) is a body set up by Government of India which has more or less adopted standards issued by ICAI-ASB.
Considering the importance of disclosures and transparency in financial statements, this study aims at providing empirical evidence on compliance with the disclosure requirements by listed companies in India.We examine the compliance level differences between Manufacturing Sector companies and Service Sector companies.Mandatory disclosures laid down by Accounting Standards are used to construct a questionnaire.Based on the responses, a Compliance Index Score has been computed to determine the score of mandatory disclosures by listed companies.Compliance Index is then associated with company attributes like Size, Profitability, Leverage etc. so as to determine the factors determining a particular level of disclosure score achieved by a company.

Related Literature
The abundant literature that is available on disclosure practices investigating a wide range of issues, such as mandatory or voluntary corporate disclosure practices, determinants of voluntary disclosure, determinants of compliance with regulation, the economic consequences of disclosure, GAAP etc.
Following Table 1 provides summary of related studies.

Sample Selection and Sources of Data
There are approximately 4200 listed non financial companies on Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).As per BSE, listed companies are classified as A Group, B Group and T Group.Top 200 companies based on Market Capitalization (75%) and Turnover (25%) are classified as A Group companies.Companies whose scripts are traded on trade to trade basic are classified as T Group companies.All other companies are classified as B Group Companies.A sample of 234 non-financial companies (representing proportionate mix of A group.B group and T group companies) has been selected from the companies listed with the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).The sample represented about 5 % of the universe.The selected companies are classified into industry type i.e. 157 companies from manufacturing sector and 77 companies service industry.Data related to calculating compliance index and other variables have been collected from annual reports of the companies for the year ended 31 st March 2009.To collect other financial information pronouncements from regulatory bodies have been used.

Dependent Variable: Compliance Index
There are 32 accounting standards issued by Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), as applicable to the companies as on 31st March 2009.We have selected 29 accounting standards for the purpose of present study since they are mandatory and applicable to all the companies.
A checklist was prepared considering the disclosures required by Accounting Standards.Each item in the checklist was examined with the help of annual report and was assigned 1 if disclosed; and 0 if not disclosed and NA if not applicable.

CI:
To compute Compliance Index following formula has been used.Each item of disclosures was given an equal weight age.

CI= Discloaures Made Disclosures Applicable
Following table 2 describes no. of disclosures considered from each Accounting Standards.

Explanatory Variables and Hypothesis
Followings explanatory variables have been used in the study.

Size:
Larger firms are assumed to be disclosing more information in the annual report.They would be having adequate resources and expert manpower to generate and disseminate information.This is also a costly exercise and large firms may be able to bear the cost.Several studies have also found Size of the firm to be a significant factor affecting disclosures (like Singhvi and Desai, 1971;Belkaoui and Kahl, 1978;McNally et al. 1982;Cooke, 1992).
H 1: Larger Companies have higher level of compliance with Accounting Standards.

Profitability:
The amount of profit generated by the firm also influences disclosures in financial statements.Managers of profitable firms may disclose detailed information in order to support the continuance of their positions and compensation agreements (as pronounced by Agency theory).Several previous studies have reported positive influence of profitability on disclosures (Singhvi and Desai, 1971;Belkaoui and Kahl, 1978;and Wallace et al., 1994).
H2: Companies with larger profits have higher level of Compliance with Accounting Standards.

Leverage:
Firm with higher level of debt are considered to be more risky and they may also incur higher amount of monitoring cost.Adequate disclosure of information in the financial statements may reduce their monitoring cost and also allows creditors to assess risk level of the (Botosan, 1997).Murphy, 1999, Joshi andMudhahki, 2001 found these variables to be statistically insignificant.The debt equity ratio is used in the present study as measure of leverage and following hypothesis has been formulated.
H 3: Companies with higher level of Leverage have a higher level of Compliance with Accounting Standards.

Age:
We expect older companies to disclose more information in the annual reports since they have adequate resources and matured personnel.They also enjoy goodwill in the market.
H 4: Older companies have higher level of Compliance with Accounting Standards.

Foreign listing:
Foreign listing is considered since at international level disclosure requirements are more qualitative and it makes companies more transparent.
H 5: Companies listed abroad have higher level of compliance to Accounting Standards.

Foreign Ownership:
In case a company has more of a foreign ownership the policy of making disclosures will be at higher rate which may make company more transparent in terms of disclosure requirements.
H 6: Companies with Foreign Ownership have higher level of compliance to Accounting Standards.

Big 4 Audit firm:
Several studies have reported that there is relationship between the types of Auditor and compliance to Accounting Standards.Street and Gray (2001) reported that level of compliance with IAS disclosure were positively associated with company being audited by Big Five Audit firms.
It can be expected that the company audited by international audit firms (Top 4) are more likely to have a higher level of compliance with Accounting Standards than the company audited by other auditors.The study considered PWC, E&Y, KPMG and Deloitte as Top 4 firms based on their revenues and international representation.
H 7: Companies which are audited by Big 4 Audit firms have higher level of compliance with Accounting Standards than other Audit firms.
Following table 3 describes explanatory variables and its computation in brief:

Formulation of Model
To identify the variable affecting Compliance Index Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression is used.Following is the description of the Model: Where, β i (1to 7) = parameters to be estimated and; ε j = the error term.

Results and Discussion
The collected data has been analysed with the help of following techniques.The software used are MS-Excel Data Analysis and SPSS 17.0.
Following Table 4 describes Compliance Index Score achieved by Companies.From Table 5 it can be observed that Compliance Score achieved by the firm is largely affected by Size of the firm, its listing at foreign stock exchange and Big 4 auditors.This implies that larger firms generally disclose more information because they can bear the cost of disclosure and also because they are generally followed by analyst.Firms listed aboard are also found to be disclosing more information which may be possible due to the fact that they have to comply with various rules and regulations of different stock exchange.Firms audited by big 4 auditors are also disclosing more information due to the expertise and reputation of auditors.
When we split the sample into manufacturing sector companies and service sector companies we observe that results are consistent for manufacturing sector companies however in case of service sector companies only size is found to be significantly affecting compliance level.

Conclusion
Average compliance of overall sample has been found to be only 71% (with SD 22.41%), and minimum compliance is 46%.If for listed companies, Compliance level is this low, for unlisted companies it is likely to be much lower.For Manufacturing Sector Companies, Size (Turnover), Big 4 Audit firm and Foreign Listed firm have been found significant.For Service Sector Companies only Size has been found significant.Findings of the study may be of help to regulators while framing the policies related to financial reporting.It can act as feedback for them to assess the level of mandatory compliance by listed companies.It can also be used by analyst to study factors driving companies towards more compliance.
Although the study raises an important issue of complying with disclosures requirements the results are limited to the sample selected for the study.There is scope for taking this research ahead by increasing sample size, considering voluntary and non-financial information disclosure from the annual report to ascertain level of compliance and disclosures.

Table 1 .
List of previous studies

Table 2 .
No. of disclosures considered from each accounting standards

Table 3 .
Details of explanatory variables Log TURN +β 2 NPR+β3 DE+β 4 Log AGE+ β 5 FOREIGN LISTING + β 6 FOR OWN + β 7 BIG 4 AUDIT FIRM + ε j The model has been tested for Overall Sample, Manufacturing Sector Companies and Service Sector Companies.

Table 4 .
Compliance index scoresAverage compliance of overall sample is 71.23%.In case of manufacturing sector Companies compliance score is 73.22 % which is higher than the average score.In case of Service sector companies' average score is less than overall average.