COVID-19 MODIFYING THE DYNAMICS OF FINANCIAL REPORTING: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced many business sectors worldwide, including the Accounting and Finance reporting perspectives. This motivated the researchers to investigate how the pandemic has affected the financial reporting of listed companies in the Sri Lankan context. It was evidenced that the empirical studies on the influence of COVID-19 on corporate financial reports based on accounting standards and techniques are still in the beginning stages; therefore, this paper sets the foundation in bridging the existing knowledge gap by examining how Covid-19 has modified the dynamics of financial reporting. This study is exploratory in nature, and the researchers adopted interpretivism philosophy and have used an inductive approach in conducting the research. The case study method was adapted, where in-depth and semi-structured interviews were applied to collect data. The study population is one hundred and fifty-eight (158) companies consisting of six (6) sectors: Banking, Materials, Consumer services, Diversified financials, Capital goods, and Telecommunication in Colombo Stock Exchange, out of which seven (7) sub-cases were chosen under the purposive sampling technique and the collected data were analyzed on thematic procedures using the Wordcloud analysis tool. Based on the findings, it was revealed that reporting aspects of different sectors were influenced differently by COVID- 19. LKAS 1(Going concern), LKAS 2 (Inventory), LKAS 16 (Cost of depreciation), SLFRS 13 (Fair value measurement) are a few of the standards generally mentioned by the respondents. The result of this study contributes to filling the existing knowledge gap and will be a value addition to contemporary academia.