Decision usefulness of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in financial reports: evidence from Australian bank-lending officers

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) reports that the objective of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is to ensure that the financial information provided by companies is useful for the economic decision-making for a variety of users (IASB,2015). It is anticipated that bank-lending officers may not perceive all the disclosures, recognition and measurement concepts in IFRS financial reports and the subsequent amendments relating to disclosures as being primarily useful for assessing the credit risk or creditworthiness of companies when granting a term loan. Therefore, two primary objectives guide the overall study – determining whether bank-lending officers perceive the accounting disclosures and measurement requirements of the IFRS useful for making their lending decisions, and whether the bank-lending officers perceive the subsequent amendments to the IFRS to be useful. The study employs a mixed methods approach of data collection, that is, a combination of quantitative data, collected through questionnaire surveys, and qualitative data, collected through semi-structured interviews.