The document responds to 20 questions posed by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in Annex 1 of the Consultation Paper "ESMA Guidelines on enforcement of financial information".

Within the European Union, the IAS-Regulation has harmonized applicable accounting standards for consolidated financial statements of capital market oriented companies by requiring IFRS since 2005. Regarding enforcement of financial reporting, the IAS-Regulation offered only small guidance for...

Purpose: The impairment-only approach to goodwill has regularly been criticized for offering too much discretion to managers and facilitating the manipulation of goodwill impairment losses. Extant research provides mixed results on whether managers exploit their inherent discretion...