The Korea Accounting Institute (KAI) has been responsible for matters relating to accounting standards since the Financial Services Commission (FSC) delegated the duty of setting, amending and interpreting accounting standards to the Korea Accounting Standards Board (KASB) nested within the KAI in accordance with the Act on External Audit of Stock Companies and Enforcement Decree of the Act. Recent endeavors of the KASB include playing a pivotal role in the successful adoption of IFRS in Korea, thereby helping to improve Korean entities’ accounting transparency to meet the global standard and also to enhance Korea’s capital market efficiency. 

Financial information provided by the current form of financial statements consist of an overly simplified body and an extensive volume of notes that disclose a list of disorderly information necessary in decision-making, even leaving some of them out occasionally. This inevitably leads to the on-going criticism that users of the financial statements cannot effectively utilise the information which are useful in making decisions. 

Against the backdrop, the KASB sought to find ways to better understand the current status of note disclosure preparation in entities and analyse usefulness of disclosed information in the notes through in-depth interviews with financial statement users. For this, the KASB requested an outside research team consisting of Prof. Jaekyung Yi of Kookmin University and Prof. Bong-Heui Han of Professor at Ajou University to carry out a research project on the topic. As a result, the research report titled ‘The Usefulness of Note Disclosures: Examination and Suggestions for Improvement’ was issued in the hope of sharing the outcome of the research with a wider range of stakeholders in Korea and overseas. 

You can find this research paper on the KASB’s website (www.kasb.or.kr). If you have any comments on the paper, please send them to the KASB by mail or email to webmaster@kasb.or.kr. 

Please note that the views expressed in this paper are those of the researchers specified above and do not necessarily represent the official views of the KAI or KASB. Also, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who were involved in this research project for their effort.

November 2018
Eui-Hyung Kim
Chair and CEO