Needs Assessment of Accounting Standards for small and medium-sized Entities (SMEs) from the Perspective of Creditors and Financial Information Providers

Iranian Accounting Standard No. 1 states that presentation of financial statements is aimed for public sector, however, according to the International Financial Reporting Standards and Iranian auditing standards for small and medium-sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs), there are no public purposes. The purpose of this study is to investigate the need to develop accounting standards for SMEs from the perspective of creditors and financial information providers in the research population. The research data is collected through interviews and questionnaires and the needs assessment is done by measuring the gap between existing standards and formulating new standards. The sample includes 371 people in two groups of creditors (141 persons) and financial information providers (230 persons) in Mashhad metropolitan area. Based on the Mann-Whitney U-test that determines a significant difference between the two groups of creditors and financial information providers as maximum 5 percent, findings of the research indicate that there is a significant difference with 95 percent of confidence between the two groups of creditors and financial information providers in terms of the gap. The results indicate that there is a need for accounting standards development for SMEs from the perspective of both creditors and financial information providers, and the need of creditors is greater than that of financial information providers. Need assessment of accounting standards development for SMEs will enable accounting standards developers to better identify the needs of financial information users and to make specific adjustments, adapting standards to the needs of users, and preventing multiple workloads.