A Study of Segment Reporting Practices: Empirical Evidence from Romania’s Banks

Banking and capital market liberalization has substantially increased the level of information required to achieve financial stability, while providing useful information, appropriate to participants and their transactions has become essential for maintaining orderly and efficient markets. This requires banks to provide appropriate and timely information that will satisfy the requirements of every user of the banking and financial information. Disclosure provided by banks has gradually improved on the one hand by Basel Agreement, and on the other hand by the International Financial Reporting Standards. This paper investigates the adoption of IFRS 8 by the Romanian banks, providing a detailed image of the segment of information in accordance with this standard. The study shows that the primary format for segment reporting in banks is represented by the segmentation activities. At certain banks, because some operations carried out were not a subject to similar risks and benefits, both in terms of the economic environment and in terms of the type of activity, there has been no identification of segments which should be reported separately under the provisions of IAS 14 neither nor since applying IFRS 8.