En alternativ årsredovisning för bostadsrättsföreningar : Framtagen för att underlätta bostadsrättsköparens förståelse av finansiell information

Sammanfattning: Abstract A housing society’s annual report is referred as the main document in which buyers can obtain information about the housing society’s financial position. However, previous research shows that households find it difficult to understand the financial information in an annual report.  In addition, the investigation on strengthened consumer protection in the cooperative flat market (SOU 2017:31) shows that buyer’s in Sweden have insufficient ability to understand the risks combined with a tenant-owner acquisition, which could have far-reaching consequences. One reason why households do not understand the annual report can be that the report does not contain sufficient descriptive information, which can demonstrate a prevailing information gap between the producer of information and its receivers. The purpose of this study is to create an adjusted annual report based on information from interviews with interest organizations for housing societies, and then examine whether a buyer’s financial understanding can be increased based on the expanded information in the adjusted management report.  In this study, qualitative interviews with individuals at different interest organizations to housing societies have been conducted, which has resulted in relevant information being added in a housing society’s management report, hoping to make the annual report more understandable. The adjusted annual report has then been tested in a quasi-experiment. In the experiment, participants in an experimental group received the adjusted annual report while participants in a control group received the original un-adjusted annual report. The participants in respective group then responded to questions about which extent they considered to understand the information in specific annual report. The results for each group have then been analyzed to measure and compare the understanding between both groups to see if there is a connection between extended information and increased understanding in an annual report. The result of the completed experiment showed that the average understanding of the annual report’s content was 81 percent higher in the experimental group compared to the control group. The conclusion is, therefore, that there is a connection between expanded information and increased understanding of the information in the adjusted annual report for the participants in the experiment.