재무제표 주석은 서로 얼마나 유사한가 (Cross-Sectional and Time Series Similarity of Financial Statement Footnote)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국회계학회
· 수록지 정보 : 회계저널 / 31권 / 5호 / 283 ~ 304페이지
· 저자명 : 현지원, 이준일, 조현권

초록

IFRS 도입 이후 재무제표에서 주석이 차지하는 비중은 그 중요성이나 분량 측면에서 크게 증가하였다. 하지만 주석 작성 실태를 조사한 보고서는 주석이 기업 고유의 유용한 정보를 담지 못하고, 금융감독원이나 감사인이 제공하는 모범사례 및 예시를 참고하여 기계적으로 작성되고 있음을 지적하였다(이재경과 한봉희 2018). 본 연구는 문장 간 코사인 유사도라는 측정치를 이용하여, 국내 기업의 주석 작성실태를 상장기업 전체로 확장하여 조사하였다. 기업 간 주석의 유사도를 분석한 횡단면 유사도 분석 결과, 임의의 기업-연도 관측치를 선택했을 때 각각의 주석 문장들과 매우 유사한 문장이 평균적으로 비교대상 기업 11.8%의 주석에, 완전히 동일한 주석 문장은 비교 기업의 3.3%에 나타났다. 전년도 주석과의 유사도를 측정했을 때에는, 전년도 주석 문장과 대부분 유사한 것으로 나타났다. 추가로 동종 산업 내 기업 간 횡단면 유사도가 전체 기업을 비교대상으로 한 횡단면 유사도보다 높음을 확인하였다. 본 연구는 주석 문장간 코사인 유사도를 이용하여, 기업의 주석들이 다른 기업 주석들이나, 자기자신의 전년도 주석과 비교하여 얼마나 유사하게 작성 되고 있는지 측정할 수 있는 방법론을 제시한다. 정량적인 측정치를 사용하여 상장기업 전체 기업의 주석 작성실태를 유사도 측면에서 살펴보고, 산업이 주석에 미치는 영향을 계량화하여 보였다는 점에서 선행연구에 더해 추후 재무제표 주석의 발전방향에 중요한 정보를 제공한다.

영어초록

The adoption of IFRS has increased the length and importance of the financial statement notes. However, the report which investigated the status of notes of 20 listed companies showed that companies fail to include useful information in their notes and heavily refer to the note templates provided by auditors or Financial Supervisory Service(Lee and Han 2018). This study expands the investigation of notes preparation status to all listed companies using an intuitive measure derived from the cosine similarity method. We examine the cross-sectional and longitudinal similarities of financial statement note sentences for all companies. The cross-sectional similarity measures how similar the sentences in note are across companies. First, we measure the cosine similarity of each sentence combination between the sentences in the focal firm’s note with all the sentences in the other firm’s financial statement note by year. If the maximum cosine similarity of the sentence pair is larger than 0.886 (less than cosine 30˚), we define the focal firm’s sentence has a ‘significantly similar sentence’ in other firms. Second, for each focal firm’s sentence, we count the number of other firms having significantly similar sentence with the focal firm’s sentence in the note. The number shows how many firms share the significantly similar sentence with each specific note sentence of the focal firm. Third, for each focal firm’s sentence, we compute the ratio of firms containing similar sentence through dividing the number of prior stage by the total number of comparing firms. Forth, to measure firm level note similarity, the ratios of each sentence are averaged by year. Our analysis reports that any sentence in financial statement notes in general has ‘significantly similar sentence (the same sentence)’ in 11.8% (3.3%) of other companies notes. The longitudinal similarity measures the similarity of note sentences with sentences in the prior year’s notes. It differs from the cross-sectional similarity that the note sentences are compared with its own note sentences of the previous year. Each note sentence is compared with all the sentences in the previous year’s note. Then, we measure the maximum cosine similarity between the sentences. The larger this value is, the more similar the sentence is to the company’s previous year’s note. Since this value is for each sentence, the longitudinal similarity of the firm is measured as the average maximum cosine similarity of each sentence. The mean value of the longitudinal cosine similarity by firm-year is 0.8448 and the median is 0.8881. The longitudinal similarity shows that most of notes’ sentences are similar to the notes’ sentences in the prior year’s financial statements. The result confirms that firms prepare the note with reference to the previous year. Additionally, we expect that the cross-sectional similarity would be higher for the firms in the same industry because the businesses are similar. The cross-sectional similarity within the same industry is higher than that of all companies as expected, but the difference is very marginal. This study contributes to the prior literature by suggesting how to measure the note similarity more objectively. The methodology can contribute empirical studies which investigate the factors that may affect note preparation. The limitation is that the specific contents of the note are not examined because the cosine similarity mechanically measures the similarity of the sentences.

참고자료

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