Les états financiers IFRS sont-ils plus transparents depuis la crise financière de 2008 ? Etat de la situation, rôle des régulateurs et perspectives

Abstract

The financial crisis highlighted some weaknesses of the IFRS standards. Therefore, the IASB modified the existing standard and created new ones. They work too on three project which are the convergence between the IFRS standard and the US GAAP, the disclosure initiative and the agreement with the IIRC. The financial crisis permitted also to identify problems in the system of financial regulation. Therefore EU created the European System of Financial Supervisors, which included ESMA. This thesis intends to demonstrate if the modification and the creation of twelve IFRS standards combined with the three projects of the IASB and the work of the ESMA enable a better transparency in the current financial statements. To achieve this, we have made a quantitative research divided in two parts. First, we made a research by questioning people, a financial analyst, a regulator, two auditors and five companies to determine if the standards modified and created by the IASB after 2008 bring more transparency in the financial statements. We concluded that eleven from the twelve standards bring more transparency despite the larger complexity in these new standards. About the projects of the IASB, the global convergence between the US GAAP and IFRS standards is not reached and the agreement between IIRC and IASB has not been realized yet. Finally, the disclosure initiative enables an increase in the quality of the information in the financial reports and the finalization of the two others projects should make them even more transparent. In the second part, we couldn't reply to the hypothesis according to which the ESMA enable the transmission of more transparent financial reports. However the aim about the supervisory practices of the ESMA is on the good way because one national authority respects the practices of control of ESMA and the uniform application of standards by member states has been conclusive for one standard. Our work demonstrates that since the financial crisis of 2008, the financial statement IFRS are more transparent. But some efforts could still made to improve the transparency of the financial statements.