The effect of the evolution of accounting bases on increasing the transparency of financial reporting

The basic role of financial accounting is providing information about an entity in the form of financial statements. Financial statements and its accounting concepts (such as accounting bases) are done by an evolved process in financial reporting with the purpose of more transparency accessibility. Although evolution is done with the goal of increasing financial transparency but it is not always occurred. For example, in changing from cash to accrual basis it is determined that some of cash reports had information content but they didn't cover in accrual basis. Therefore, cash flow statement presentation was required beside the other accrual financial statements. So investigating on the relationship between transparency and evolution is a basic problem. The main purpose of this research is to measure the amount of information transparency in accounting bases for identifying the effect of accounting bases evolution on accounting information transparency increment. This study is an analytical, correlation based, applied, quantitative and inductive research which is done in 2014. Sampling method is random and Data is derived from studied company's financial statements. Analysis of variance (ANOVA), coefficient of correlation and t-test are also used. The results have shown that the amounts of transparency in various bases of accounting are different and the information transparency is increased as a result of bases evolution but it is done by general evolution not trivial evolution. Also it is discovered that transparency increasing in each of bases is not significant than the basis immediately before that basis but the transparency differences between the bases with at most two and at least one level of distance are significant. For example, there is not a significant difference between accrual and adjusted-accrual bases but there is a significant difference between accrual basis with semi-accrual and adjusted-cash bases that have two levels of evolution distance.