CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Accounting is an information system that is used for communication purposes and for the purpose of aiding decision making. According to Bello (2009), accounting is believed to be an information infrastructure used by economic units to achieve various economic decision. Corporate organizations use accounting to communicate to all stakeholders about their operation performance and position at a particular time period. The process through which companies communicate to the public about their operation is called financial reporting. Corporate financial reporting is the medium through which companies communication to the external society about their operational performance in term of profitability, efficiency and responsibility (Abubakar, 2010, Nzekwe, 2000) financial reporting of a corporate entity constitutes a combination of qualitative and quantitative financial reports, which are referred to as a firm’s bill of health. Various stakeholders their decisions relative to a firm’s performance and position based on the accounting information supplied by if in its annual financial reports accounts. Financial reporting by companies is effected via the preparation and publication of financial statements. These financial statements are required to exhibit certain degree of quality in term of their information contents.
Mines & Wahlen (2006) and Belkaoui (2002) opined that accounting information contained in the financial reports should possess certain qualities as relevance verifiability, understanding, neutrality, timeliness, comparability, and completeness. When the financial reports disclose quality accounting information according to Benston (2007), the decision of the users (investors, management, government, employees, creditors, analysis) of the report could as well be qualitative are informed. The users of the financial reports use the reports frequently in passing judgements on the viability of a company. According to Ghofor & Saraswat; (2008), investors in many cases are too dependent on the quality of information disclose in the financial reports of companies has been an area of debate by both accounting theoreticians and those in practice (Van Beest, Braim & Boelens, 2009). New Economy firms are defined as telecommunication, media and technology firms (TMT). A large part of the assets in these firms are intangible since they are rely strongly on intellectual capital, research and develop, and other intangible assets (Lopes, 2001). In many cases TMT firms majors assets is the human capital and the intellectual ability of their work force. Although all firms need strong and competitive human resources to succeed, the success of TMT firms largely depends on the quality of human resource. The characteristics that differentiate successful organization from their less successful counterparts in almost every industry is the quality of the people they are able to get and keep. These TMT firms do invest heavily in employee training to make sure that their employees skill levels are kept current (Robbins, 2001). Robbins (2001) added that money spent on improving employees capacity is one of the best investments that business executives could make.
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