Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on financial reporting and disclosure practices: empirical evidence from Bangladesh

Some firms also offered early retirement packages and temporary salary cuts in order to reduce payroll costs. When the entire world shut down because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the accounting profession had to adapt quickly. Not only did many CPA firms have to figure out how to provide services remotely, they also had to ensure that they were able to help their clients adapt to the many uncertainties facing them.

Accounting firms must put their employees at the fore and formulate a healthy hybrid working policy that ensures a good work-life balance for accountants. But its significance has increased https://www.bookstime.com/blog/pandemic-and-accounting-industry drastically in the hybrid working scenario. Practices, therefore, must innovate new virtual training processes to help accountants stay updated with the changing industry trends.

Population and Sample of Study

Thus, we encourage future studies to look at the resilience of private family firms with idiosyncratic investment strategies (Bartz & Winkler, 2016; Gomez-Mejia et al., 2014; Santoro et al., 2021) and not affected by financial market pressures (Carney et al., 2015; Huybrechts et al., 2012). We also hope that others will examine the non-financial performance of family business during the pandemic, given the importance of non-financial goals in family firms compared to their nonfamily counterparts (Chua et al., 2018; Kotlar & De Massis, 2013). In so doing, our study challenges the literature highlighting the extraordinary performance of founder CEOs in family business (Miller et al., 2007a; Wagner et al., 2015), identifying the conditions under which descendant-led family firms also create financial value for family firms. The study by Alao and Oladjo (2020) points out that the COVID-19 Pandemic makes it difficult to be able to assess the going concern of the business. This is due to the certainties on the future operations of the business that has been created by the pandemic measures such as social distancing and lockdowns.

• Several respondents who hired virtually mentioned that the interviews would have been better in person.
• While much of this may seem like new territory — perhaps even territory that is somewhat difficult to traverse — these seven skills also unlock exciting new opportunities for professional growth for all CPAs as well as a honing of abilities to greatly add value to client relationships.
• Due to presence of measurement error or similar context, unmeasured influences and other constructs within conceptual framework, a latent construct fails to account more variance in the observed variables related with it.
• Family managers identify with the firm and benefit from psychological ownership that pushes them to search for better solutions to business issues (Rau et al., 2019), particularly in rough economic times (Zhou et al., 2017).

Post the pandemic, many accountants are now readily quitting jobs without another job in hand. Thus, it has become imperative that accounting firms innovate new work models to accommodate their workforce’s diverse needs and comforts. The variance inflation factors (VIFs) never exceed 2, suggesting that multicollinearity is not a concern. The results of the unit root test of Levine et al. (2002), applied to COVID-19 growth and financial performance variables, are reported in Table 4.

International Journal of Accounting and Financial Reporting

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for most businesses globally at unprecedented levels. This study assesses the composite reliability (CR), which specifies the internal consistency and reliability of the measured variables, and average variance extracted (AVE) to identify convergent validity (Hair et al., 2014). Hair et al. (2014) stated that the fitness of every individual item to make any specific constructs are confirmed by Convergent Validity. Besides, AVE analysis assesses the extent of variance controlled by a construct regarding the variance originated from random measurement error (Fornell and Larcker, 1981).

While much of this may seem like new territory — perhaps even territory that is somewhat difficult to traverse — these seven skills also unlock exciting new opportunities for professional growth for all CPAs as well as a honing of abilities to greatly add value to client relationships. Intellectual curiosity about the latest technologies and their potential application are critical for accounting firm executives to lead their teams, advise clients, and sustain a competitive advantage. Accounting firm leaders need to cultivate emotional intelligence, empathy, cross-cultural intelligence, and business savvy to help clients, colleagues, and employees navigate the ongoing disruption and transformation. Clients that were financially healthy entering 2020 may have found themselves with cash shortfalls by February.

Problem of Study

For employees, there is a need to communicate clearly and often, particularly in a virtual world. Whether you are giving updates on remote working or making tough decisions about staffing, you need to be thoughtful in terms of the words and actions you take. For example, for those companies in triage mode, there is a large difference between a furlough and a layoff from an HR and finance perspective. Employers typically continue to pay certain benefits throughout the furlough, maintain an employment relationship with the employee, and set timelines.

Finally, SH has a significant and positive impact on FRD practices during this pandemic. It signifies that businesses should decisively disclose all the benefits being taken and given by the businesses. Opportunity of tax deferral, high payment of employees for performing during pandemic and announcement and disbursement of stimulus packages should be presented through FRD.

Table 5

They also shall help the companies develop special plans to manage the crisis and pandemics which may occur in the future. To quantify risk, consider applying different forecast scenarios with assigned probabilities to provide a framework for analyzing and adjusting a range of events and outcomes, rather than attempting to compress all the complexity into a single forecast. Many companies are engaging in scenario planning as they develop their strategies to manage the impact of the crisis on their business. Scenario forecasting also facilitates a company’s compliance with their risk and control framework with respect to prospective financial information. The findings indicated that that there a relationship between accounting, financial measures and business survival during and in the post COVID-19 pandemic environment.

This study finds the HTMT ratio within threshold level and shows good discriminants validity. In other words, it does not comprise the overlying elements from the respondents’ perception in the constructs (see Table 5). Some in the accounting community say the March quarter’s financial statements will provide evidence of the outbreak’s financial effects. These experts recommend that finance personnel and practitioners take the https://www.bookstime.com/ following steps. “We urge issuers to work with their audit committees and auditors to ensure that their financial reporting, auditing, and review processes are as robust as practicable in light of the circumstances in meeting the applicable requirements,” the regulators said. The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to create significant changes for CPAs who prepare company financial statements — and for auditors as well.

Investors too must pay attention to a firm’s ownership and management structure in evaluating the potential resilience of the business to future crises. At the same time, our results warrant caution in relying only on founders in the top management team of family firms, as they might be as useful in weathering adverse environmental events as other family members. Then, we explored the role of industry concentration using the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (estimated as the sum of squared market shares measured as segment sales at the industry level) (Nawrocki & Carter, 2010). We expect that family firms operating in industries with low concentration (i.e., high degree of competition between firms) are able to adopt more resilient business practices that allow them to decrease costs and financial losses during the pandemic. On the other hand, family firms in highly concentrated industries (i.e., dominated by a few players) would be reluctant to do so, given their large stakes in these sectors and more conservative business practices.

• This affected the operations of different businesses since they could hardly access the inputs for manufacturing.
• Accounting firm leaders need to cultivate emotional intelligence, empathy, cross-cultural intelligence, and business savvy to help clients, colleagues, and employees navigate the ongoing disruption and transformation.
• On the other hand, nonfamily firms are more flexible in adjusting employment levels and socially friendly initiatives up and down as they see fit.
• This result implies that firms should disclose BC related information very promptly because such disclosure can affirm investors about the changes of terms and conditions of any business contract made earlier.

Organisations have also been focusing on innovating virtual games and engagement activities to keep employees motivated. Finance leaders are moving into 2023 with cautious and measured optimism, well aware of the challenges that lie ahead. But with these challenges come opportunities and solutions, so as finance and accounting teams jump into 2023, here’s what to prepare for and how to excel in 2023. Finally, accountants must be proactive in finding the jobs that will expand their capabilities and make them increasingly in-demand for years to come. As the changing priorities of the Big Four illustrate, the 21st-century accountant will be different from that of the last century. Disruptions of all forms necessitate these skills, though the current COVID-19 pandemic has also particularly accelerated the need for technological competence.

How Has the Pandemic Changed the Accounting Profession?

There is significant difference between the published financial reporting before and during COVID 19 era. According to Rephann (2020), the pandemic has resulted in complex and unpredicted consequences in the financial institutions, educational sector, tourism and hospitality, industrial, manufacturing and transport, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and local and international trade. These have resulted in massive production shutdown and supply chain disruptions due to the closures in china, causing global ripple effects across all economic sectors in a rare twin supply-demand chain shock [11]. Rego [9] submitted that political and economies of scale can significantly affect a nations’ ability to reduce their own burden for the interest of her citizens and any other nation that is economically loyal to them. The theory is related to this study considering the economic influence, China is commanding in the entire world. China directly or indirectly has an economic presence in virtually the entire world that coronavirus the pandemic that started in a city in China spread to every country in the world.