The including of rent for premises as costs for leases -Compliance with disclosure requirements for leases in K3 regarding rent for premises

Abstract

In recent years, Swedish accounting has undergone major changes, particularly regarding the K3 regulatory framework. Bigger companies whose financial year began after December 31, 2013 have to comply with K3, however, K3 compliance is optional for smaller companies who could instead choose to comply with K2. We have discovered some companies in the trade industry do not include rent for premises in lease disclosures, which is, compared to previous regulations, a new requirement for K3. The purpose of the thesis is to not only investigate to what extent K3 compliant companies include rent for premises in the disclosure of leases, but also to investigate underlying factors as to whether or not rent for premises is included in the lease disclosures. We have, based on two existing theories and previous research, formed hypotheses that we have tested in order to find explanations for the companies’ accounting choices and lack of disclosure regarding the rent for premises. Previous research has mostly dealt with earlier standards in Sweden and the IFRS. However, we focused on the K3 in our study using a quantitative method based on company annual reports from 2014. It turned out that 56 of our total sample of 178 companies did not include rent for premises in the disclosure for leases. We conducted a regression analysis which shows that the agency theory, stakeholder perspective and previous research about the relationship between information and audit firms can explain the omission of rent for premises in the disclosure of leases.