A Survey on Italian Banks' Financial Statements: Impairment Test for Intangible Assets and Disclosure

This paper examines the methods used to perform impairment test for intangible assets from a business combination and the information provided by the consolidated financial statements of a Group of Italian banks for the period 2009-2014. Literature on this theme makes it fair to assume that there is a positive link between profitability and the tendency of the management to recognise impairment losses of intangible assets that are consistent in terms of timeliness and magnitude; despite this, the high risk of opportunistic behaviour to delay/avoid write-off, in any case remains. The existence of an actual link between profitability (IPR) and the quality of the disclosure (GA) was therefore verified, ascertaining not only the reliability, but also the strength and direction of the statistical connection between the above two aspects. The results of the study confirm the basic assumption.