Il "nuovo" bilancio d'esercizio: una prima valutazione dell'impatto, sui conti ordinari, del cambio di regole contabili

The annual accounts of 2016 represent a significant moment of discontinuity in the process of preparing the Italian financial statements: The Legislative Decree No. 139 of August, 18, 2015, aiming to implement the Directive 2013/34/EU, is the most important (and fast) update of the Italian accounting rules from the adoption, pursuant to the Legislative Decree No. 127 of April, 9, 1991, of the repealed IV and VII EEC Directives. The changes made to the Italian Civil Code, accompanied by a re-elaboration of the Italian GAAP, introduced new general financial reporting principles, changed the structure of the financial statements, innovated the measurement bases and diversified the disclosure in the notes: an important change of the financial reporting model, influenced by IFRS, with potentials and significant effects – also thanks to a general retroactive application – both in relation to measuring the company's performance in terms of income and capital, and in relation to the information level in the notes. This paper represents a first contribution to the discussion on the actual impact of the Legislative Decree No. 139/2015 and the new Italian GAAP on preparers’ behaviour and the values reported in their financial statements. For this purpose, we investigate a sample of 1,497 full accounts referring to fiscal periods ending on 31 December 2016 and subject to the new accounting rules, elaborated by innovative software technologies able to process them from the native XBRL format. The results show that the first-time adoption had significant impacts: 15% of the companies restated the comparative values; these companies are also characterized by an average reduction in shareholder’s equity of about 4.5%.