Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

Achievement of high quality of accounting information in financial statements requires thorough adherence to generally accepted accounting principles. In connection with deferred tax, this concerns especially the prudence principle and the going concern principle. The deferred tax also has an impact on fiscal sustainability in any given country. The aim of this contribution is to evaluate how information about deferred tax is reported by small and medium sized enterprises in Czech Republic and evaluate quality of such reporting. The research was conducted in the form of a questionnaire survey concerning recognition of deferred tax among accounting units which prepare their financial statements according to IFRS or according to Czech accounting standards. The entities that stated in the questionnaire that they recognize deferred tax were further analysed in more detail. The survey revealed that the standard does not take into consideration that small and medium-sized enterprises would not have to account for deferred tax. The research clearly showed the unwillingness of accounting entities to recognize deferred tax voluntarily.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the opinion of enterprise representatives upon the risk of errors occurrence in selected areas of accounting. Research presented in this paper explains the view of enterprise accountants upon the risk of errors occurrence, both unintentional and intentional, aimed towards the creation of so called „creative accounting“. The research itself, done on a sample of 232 Czech enterprises, was based on questionnaire investigation which focused on perception of problematic areas influencing the quality of accounting information. The obtained set of data was evaluated using descriptive method and mathematical/inference statistics. Special testing was done at hypotheses on concordance of two mean values and at the Friedman test. Evaluation of problematic rates of individual areas of accounting revealed that practically each observed area of accounting is connected with specific difficulties. The major causes of problems are tax impacts, namely in the area of the cost, time differentiation and of revenues and also difficulty in pricing, especially in the area of inventories and fixed and financial assets. High respondents´ concordance on rating individual accounting areas as to the risk of an error occurrence was detected. It stemmed from the research that the risk of formation of unintentional errors is subjectively rated as the highest in the areas of conjectural and adjusting items and the lowest at asset and depreciation classification. Rating the space for intentional distortion of accounting statements indicates a very reserved attitude of the respondents. The results have proved that in the respondents´ opinion practically all areas of accounting give space for occurrence of errors. The results of the research provided a somewhat different perspective on the issue of accounting errors in comparison with results published by other authors who used objective assessment of error rate as a departure point.