Quality of disclosure When management provides the necessary disclosures in the notes to the balance sheet or the statement of financial position, profit and loss account or the statement of comprehensive income and cash flow statement, it facilitates the analysis of the business reality of the company by external parties. Financial statements to the stakeholders of the firm about the result, the cash flow and the financial position of the firm. In principle, the published figures should represent the underlying economic situation of the firm. However, due to the flexibility that exists in the accounting standards to be applied and incentives top executives face towards earnings a situation might created in which the published figures the financial statements do not translate the underlying the firm. Although companies must provide a minimum level of disclosure as required by the GAAP they are complying with, the management team can always make more voluntary disclosures. Disclosure quality refers to the compliance of a company to all the disclosures required by the GAAP and to the informativeness of the voluntary disclosures which are presented in the annual report. So disclosure quality and the level of disclosure can also be extended to the narrative part of the annual report. This will be discussed further in Chapter 32. Empirical and analytical accounting research has paid attention to disclosure practices. Most empirical research studies provide evidence that an increase in disclosure leads to lower costs of capital due to the reduction in information asymmetry (e g. Leuz and Verrechia, 2000). The analytical research, however, indicates that there is an optimal level of disclosure for a company Disclosure quality is an important benchmark when inter-firm comparisons are made and it relates to several aspects. Some examples of disclosure quality will now be illustrated.