The usefulness of the value added statement in South Africa

Abstract

The value added statement is published by about 200 of the 400 companies listed in the industrial sector on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. This is the highest incidence of publication of such statements reported to date. It appears from a literature review that the usefulness of the statement has never been tested in depth from the perspective of the users. The importance of this study stems from the increased incidence of publication of the statement in South Africa and the lack of evidence substantiating its usefulness. The study aims to investigate the usefulness of the value added statement in South Africa from the perspective of all the different users of external financial information. The literature review revealed that, although the value added statement is based on the theory of value added and was aimed at broadening the scope of financial reporting, it did not develop to the point of being governed by statutory requirements. This resulted in diverse accounting treatment in the statement and the resultant loss of consistency and comparability, which gave an early indication from the literature that value added statements might not be very useful. The usefulness of the value added statement was evidenced by users actually using the statement and the explanatory and predictive power of value added information. No reliable evidence of users actually using the statement was found in the literature. Evidence was found that value added information had greater predictive and explanatory power than earnings, but these findings were found to be inconclusive. A questionnaire survey among users representing the South African users of external financial reports revealed little evidence of actual use of the value added statement. The general usage trend from past to present, was to use the statement less rather than more. More than fifty percent of the respondents do not intend to use the statement in future, even if the shortcomings experienced could be overcome. The major reason for this lack of support for the value added statement seems to be the shortcomings experienced by the users when publishing and using the statement, which stems mainly from the lack of statutory requirements. Another reason is that the value added statement introduces very little information that is not already available from the other financial statements. The predictive and explanatory power of value added information was examined by doing statistical analysis on empirical data of South African listed companies. This analysis indicated that value added information did not have additional explanatory and predictive power when compared to earnings and that the high inter-correlation between value added and earnings prevented value added from being used in prediction models in combination with earnings. The predictive and explanatory power of value added information is therefore limited. This research study could not find sufficient evidence of the usefulness of value added statements to justify their continued publication, neither could it find significant support for future use. It is therefore suggested that the publication of the statement be discontinued and that additional information be included in the income statement disclosures to accommodate this.