Conclusions
While the IFRS application for consolidated financial statements prepared by publicly traded corporations resulted in a common set of standards within the European Union, a variety of local accounting standards are applicable for separate financial statements and consolidated financial statements of non-publicly traded corporations. Beside conceptions for an entire IFRS adoption, the adoption of IFRS for SME is widely discussed, but not designated to date in both the European Union and Germany. Whereas there is broad empirical evidence on the quality of information of different accounting systems from the perspective of publicly traded corporations, findings regarding the quality of accounting data of non-publicly traded (mid-sized) corporations are rare. As it is very important to lead the discussion on a broad comprehensive data base and due to the fact that most corporations in Germany and the European Union aren’t publicly traded, we consider data on accounting preferences of non-publicly traded mid-sized corporations as being essential. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates whether non-publicly traded mid-sized corporations prefer IFRS, IFRS for SME or German-GAAP concerning the information quality of accounting data.We expected the findings from our survey to differ from prior research gained from data concerning publicly traded corporations, as we anticipated a much lower approval for IFRS statements within the group of non-pub- licly traded mid-sized corporations. Our expectations thereby resulted from the implementation of the German- Accounting Law Reform Act in 2009, intended to equal relevance/quality of German-GAAP to IFRS, a general skepticism towards IFRS in Germany and potential in-group biases. Due to the controversial discussion about a possible adoption of IFRS for SME and a majority considering it as proven that accounting convergence within the European Union based on an IFRS for SME adoption is both, useless and impossible, we furthermore expected a majority of our respondents to prefer (full-)IFRS to IFRS for SME.As expected we find indication for a relatively higher preference of non-publicly traded mid-sized corporations for German-GAAP, albeit and unexpectedly, survey data to show a pendant majority. Surprisingly, we even find a relatively higher preference for German-GAAP within the group of publicly traded mid-sized corporations.Concerning the question, either IFRS for SME would result in a higher level of information quality compared to (full-)IFRS, findings suggest that the respondents of both groups expect IFRS for SME to be of higher quality. As prior research mainly rejects an IFRS for SME adoption, these findings are unexpected.Overall, our findings suggest that non-publicly traded mid-sized corporations prefer German-GAAP to (full-) IFRS with respect to the level of information quality but expect benefits of an IFRS for SME adoption compared to an application of (full-)IFRS.