Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study and compare the impact of the adoption of the international standards IAS/IFRS and the legal regime of a country on the pertinence of the discretionary accruals in terms of its quality of the prediction of future operating cash flows in two contexts: The French and United-Kingdom. The findings of our study prove that the adoption of these norms has clearly improved the predictive quality of discretionary accruals in the British context. In France, such effect has been demonstrated as significant and positive for both periods. The study of the impact of the IFRS norms on the predictive quality of discretionary accruals on the two European countries of our study shows that in the British context, the association between the discretionary accruals and the future operating cash flows is more important for the companies using the international norms than in those applying the British ones. In the French context, no significant association between the discretionary accruals and the IFRS has been verified. Next, our study has spread to see the impact of the legal regime on the predictive power of discretionary accruals before and after the adoption of the IAS/IFRS norms. The findings prove that the fullness of the association between the future operating cash flows and the discretionary accruals is stronger for the enterprises which are under the British context than those under the French one.

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