BSC 성과보고서: 현행 재무보고서의 새로운 대안

Abstract

Academic and practicing accountants have concerned that financial statements have lost a

significant portion of their relevance to investors for valuation purposes. Blair and Wallman

(2001) show that, for the last ten years, the explanatory power of financial accounting

information for market equity values has decreased by at least 20%. My statistical tests

utilizing data from the Korea Stock Exchange also favor the similar claim.

In the meanwhile, many researchers (for example, Lev 2001) have addressed that it will be

hard to find ways of improving financial reporting without disclosing information about

unrecorded intangibles. This paper suggests standard-setters adopt the Balanced Scorecard

(henceforth BSC) performance reporting as an alternative of current financial reporting. The

BSC, as Kaplan and Norton (1992) has advocated, complements financial measures of past

performance with measures of three drivers of future performance— customer, internal

business process, and learning and growth, which provide valuable information about the

unrecorded intangibles.

As a performance reporting system, the BSC may lead to confusion, conflict, and lack of

focus because of non-existence of a clear linkage between unrecorded intangibles and

expected future performance. However, even a verbal explanation about what the business has accomplished in improving its key success factors would be a great role of

complementing the traditional financial statements.