7 Conclusion
Focusing on three key groups of parties in the financial reporting process (preparers, auditors and users), this study examined the impact on connotative meaning and decision behaviour of a change in the promulgated definition of “cash”, as it relates to the cash flow statement, necessitated by convergence with IFRS in New Zealand. Results suggest that the three financial reporting groups do not hold the meaning of cash within the same cognitive structure. This finding supports the proposition that the receivers of accounting information may not be interpreting that information in the manner intended by the sender. Given that accounting communication is reliant on shared meaning, such miscommunication may be leading to unnecessary misunderstandings and tensions among the many parties to the reporting process.
A further finding of this study was that the measured meaning of cash for each of the three financial reporting groups was sensitive to the alternative definition of cash adopted by NZ IAS 7. Similarly, classification decisions were found to be influenced by the particular definition of cash assigned to the research participants. These results suggest that subtle differences in regulated definitions of accounting concepts have the potential to cause unanticipated changes in meaning and consequential changes in decision outcomes – even for seemingly uncontroversial and uncontested concepts in accounting.
In finding a direct association between measured meaning and decision outcomes for both auditor and preparer groups, this study extends the work of Hronsky and Houghton (2001) and confirms the importance of connotative meaning in the domain of accounting