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Before the Enron Collapse: What Corporate CFOs Around the World Said About the Status of Accounting and Disclosure Practices

James R. Barth

Auburn University, and Milken Institute, 1250 Fourth Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA

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Susanne Trimbath

Milken Institute, 1250 Fourth Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA

Corresponding author.

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, and

Glenn Yago

Milken Institute, 1250 Fourth Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219091503001158Cited by:7 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

Corporate Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in many countries at different levels of development and in various parts of the world considered financial statement disclosure and corporate corruption to be serious corporate problems long before the Enron debacle. This paper presents the results of a survey of CFOs conducted across 40 countries during the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2001. Most of the respondents, including those in the United States, considered the lack of adequate disclosure of information by companies to be a bigger issue than either corrupt business practices or a lack of effective accounting guidelines. Only in the United Kingdom did more CFOs consider the lack of effective accounting guidelines to be an issue of more concern than the lack of disclosure.

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