The Origins and Development of Consolidated Financial Statements in Russia
Abstract
This paper discusses the results of research conducted with the aim of establishing the time period when the practice of making consolidated financial statements for a group of companies fi rst appeared in Russia as well as describing the evolution of this type of financial statements. The consolidated financial statements, — as the statement indicators of the parent company and affiliated companies, i.e. the group reporting unite, have been made in Russia since 1992. The article considers the practice of providing similar or summary reporting which developed during the Soviet period of Russian history in order to evaluate its effect on the formation of the consolidated financial statements of nowadays. Authors have come to a conclusion that Russian consolidated financial statements are likely to originate in the financial statements of trusts and the associations, whose history dates back to 1936. Later it was reviewed to include provisions for the planned economy of the USSR to keep up with the consolidated statements of foreign countries with market economy. In addition, it seems that the methodology of “the Soviet consolidation » originates in the statistical generalizations of the accounting statements developed in prerevolutionary Russia in the end of a XIX century by I. I. Kaufman and P. V. Ol’. If Russia had not changed
its political course in 1917, the works by these scientists would have formed the basis of the domestic consolidated statements. With the transition to market economy (in 1992) in Russia, the methodology of the given kind of the reporting began to be reformed consistently for the purpose of regulating new kinds of operations (acquisitions, private capital participation in the companies, etc.) within the world system of IFRS. Starting with financial statements of 2012, in compliance with statutory requirements, consolidated fi nancial reporting for public and major Russian companies has been prepared in accordance with the IFRS.Refs 37. Fig. 1. Tables 3.
Keywords:
consolidation, summary reporting, IFRS, accounting history, macro-reporting, aggregation, statistics, accounting in Russia, consolidated financial statements
Downloads
References
References in Latin Alphabet
Translation of references in Russian into English
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Articles of the St Petersburg University Journal of Economic Studies are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.