External financial reporting and management information: a survey of UK management accountants

The interaction between external financial reporting requirements and management information has been a topic of debate both in the literature of management accounting, associated with the ideas of ‘relevance lost’, and in the literature of accounting regulation, where managerial action has been seen as one source of potential economic consequences. This paper presents the results of a postal questionnaire survey which collected the views of professionally qualified management accountants working in U.K. industrial and commercial firms. The paper documents the results from the survey on issues such as the respondents' beliefs about the influence of requirements for external financial accounting reports on internal systems design and decision-making within organizations. The paper also presents findings on areas of regulatory change having greatest impact on U.K. companies and reporting of information within these organizations. The survey is an initial part of a larger study in which the primary investigation is being undertaken through longitudinal case studies within a number of U.K. companies.