Accounting Restatements: A European Perspective

Accounting information has a strong political meaning and cases of account-ing failure demonstrate that regulation and standards are far from saving ac-countants from mistakes and auditors from misrecognizing the errors. Financial statements offer guidelines to the depiction of a proper portrait of the entity, but in the settlement of the accounting practice there is still plenty of room for the personal professional opinions of the preparers. Moreover, a determinant role has the controller, as long as auditing committees and ex-ternal auditors bear the powers to force preparers to adequate the reports to a different interpretation and measurement of the economic reality involving the accounting practices in the firm. This book is motivated by the long lasting, although still recent, discussion on how to make the accounting numbers, while supported by auditors fa-vourable opinions, are definitely reliable, and eliminate any suspect that the accounting reports could be affected by an opportunism, which is docu-mented by the discovery of accounting mistakes occurring too often.