A Practical Approach to Other Comprehensive Income: Does Anyone Really Care?

Sammanfattning: Since 2009, accounting producing entities have been required to incorporate other comprehensive income in their financial statements. Much research has been conducted in order to determine what statistical value relevance this concept should have. In this study, we seek to examine the perceived value of other comprehensive income in practise. A pre-study is carried out to understand how other comprehensive income occurs in Swedish large cap companies. Thereafter follows our main study where we analyse comment letters, regarding other comprehensive income, collected by the IASB. Our results show that 98% of the companies included in our sample reported other comprehensive income but little information outside the statement of comprehensive income was given in the financial reports. From the main study, we were able to conclude that the respondents clearly demonstrated a preference for profit or loss as the primary financial performance measure. However, this conclusion does not directly imply that other comprehensive income would be useless or invaluable in practise. Consequently, we fail to provide evidence that could imply that accounting producing entities perceive other comprehensive income as a useful concept in practise.