Throughout many years there have been discussions within the European Union (EU) regarding harmonization and improvement of accounting rules for companies with listed shares or other securities. The ambition exists to adopt, the within the union applied accounting standards, to those applied globally. These discussions lead the year 2002 to adoption by the council and parliament of international accounting standards (IFRS). The ordinance meant that all listed European companies have to adopt international accounting standards, accepted for application within the EU, for their consolidated accounts.

During July 2003 the Swedish Government Official Reports issued a report (SOU 2003:71) stating, among other things, the differences and oppositions of implementing IFRS on a corporate level in Sweden, since corporate disclosure is regulated in Swedish law by Bokföringslagen (BFL) and Årsredovisningslagen (ÅRL). One of the main obstacles for the full implementation of IFRS is that a company’s annual report underlies the governmental taxation and an implementation of IFRS would affect this balance. If IFRS was to be introduced on a corporate level it would also be deemed illegal to use tax allocation reserves.

Because of this we chose to investigate the contradictions arising with an implementation of IFRS and to examine how the companies position themselves in this question. Aided by agency theory, positive accounting theory, stakeholder theory and institutional theory we prepare hypotheses to be able to test and prove witch preferences that affect the companies’ opinion in the question of implementing IFRS on a corporate level. Then we formulated questions concerning these areas and sent out a web based poll to companies in the categories three (K3) and four (K4), to learn about their attitude towards implementing IFRS. Through testing for significance in SPSS we have concluded that most of the company leaders are negative to an implementation of IFRS on a corporate level. We have also noticed that the issue affecting a company leader in his or hers decision of implementing IFRS is the internal knowledge about IFRS.

Keywords: IFRS, agency theory, positive accounting theory, stakeholder theory, institutional theory, consolidated account, corporate level