Impacto da ausência da correção monetária na característica qualitativa de comparabilidade da informação: um estudo aplicado às empresas brasileiras de siderurgia e metalurgia listadas na BM&FBovespa

Abstract

This research has provided a discussion about the impacts on qualitative characteristics of comparability of information resulting from the lack of monetary correction of financial statements in the current Brazilian economic scenario. In face of that, the monetary correction of balance sheet was applied in the financial statements of Brazilian companies included in the subsector of steel and metallurgy that are listed on BM&FBOVESPA, from 2009 to 2014. It was calculated the comparability ratio between different companies and between different periods of the same company both at historical values and at adjusted for inflation values, considering the net profit, return on equity (ROE) and the economic value added (EVA®), which are important performance ratio used by investors as users of accounting information. Hypotheses were made for each variable in order to verify the differences of comparability between the adjusted information and the historical information. Those hypotheses were tested through the application of Student’s T-test, assuming as the null hypothesis the equality between the comparability of adjusted ratio and historical ratio, so the test’s role is indicate its acceptance or rejection. Moreover, it was calculated and analysed the percentage change between the comparability ratio considering inflationary effects and the comparability ratio without those effects. The results of hypothesis tests have shown comparability between different companies for all variables. In another hand, the results of the time axis tests have shown comparable differences for the ROE, with no statistical evidence of differences in comparability between periods for net income and for EVA®. However, the percentage change of the adjusted ratio of temporal comparability compared to historical ratio for those variables has shown significant impacts on the companies, which should not be neglected. This discovery corroborates the importance of the monetary correction of financial statements.