Survey of European Financial Reporting Enforcement

This paper analyses how the strictness in financial reporting enforcement varies across 17 European countries and the extent to which enforcement proxies in the existing accounting literature reflects the actual performed financial reporting enforcement. Based on survey responses from European enforcement bodies and regulatory specialists, the study observes extensive variations in the strictness of financial reporting enforcement across the European countries, despite ESMA’s efforts to achieve more homogeneous enforcement in Europe. Furthermore, existing enforcement indices used in the accounting literature do not generally correlate with the enforcement index developed in this study, which begs the question of what the existing enforcement indices of financial reporting are measuring.