CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Financial accounting is the language of business as it is the basic tool for recording, reporting and evaluating economic events and transactions that affect business enterprises. It processes all documents of a business financial performance from payroll, cost, capital expenditure and other obligations to sale revenue and owners’ equity. It provides financial accounting report about one’s business to the internal and external users, such as managers, investors and others. It is sometimes referred to as a means to an end, with the ending being the decision that is helped by the availability of accounting report (Arneld and Hope 1990). Management is the art of working particularly through people, for the achievement of the broad goals of an organisation (Ejiofor 2002), in trying to achieve these goals the manager has to map out strategies to find out the accounting report suitable for the company. Management accounting uses both financial and non financial information and is generally intended for the use of internal users who use the information to make decisions that help achieve the goals and objectives of the organisation. Financial information used by management accountants include sale growth, profits, return on capital employed and market shares, non financial information include customer satisfaction level, production quality, performance of competing products and customer loyalty. Of recent, the harmonization and international convergence of financial accounting report and practices are of interest to researchers in both developed and developing countries like Nigeria.
For the past decade, members of the accounting profession have been anticipating the adoption of the international financial reporting standard (Marshall, Bender, Swiger, 2010) and this anticipation has prompted a lot of academic research on the subject of adoption of international financial reporting standard (IFRS) by dierent countries of the world-Nigeria is not exempted. As a result of this, the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) announced the transition date for adopting international financial reporting standard (IFRS) for business organizations in Nigeria to begin from January 1, 2012. Financial report is a formal and detailed statement describing financial activities of a business organization. For such a business entity, financial report is a statement that reports all relevant financial information, presented in a structured manner and in a form easy to understand for managerial use for taking prompt and informed decision making related to investment (IASB, 2007) and also to decision making pertaining to production planning, investment planning, expected returns and performance evaluation.