Strategies for Goodwill Allocation

Sammanfattning: Since 2005 all companies listed on a regulated stock exchange within the European Union are required to present their financial reports in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Accounting Standards (IAS). The purposes of these standards are to accomplish international harmonization of accounting rules to make financial reports more comparable. However, recent research has shown that some firms tend to use goodwill strategically in a business combination by manipulating the acquired assets and consciously allocate the intangible assets to goodwill to reduce the depreciation in the income and decrease costs. This phenomenon may reduce the comparability between financial reports and thus has an opposite effect on the purpose of IFRS and IAS.The aim of this study is to show how the companies involved in this study allocate goodwill strategically. Furthermore, the introduction of the new standards has contributed to that goodwill now is a subject for impairment test, therefore we want to show whether this affected the comparability of the companies in this study.An empirical study was conducted, based on interviews with four Swedish managers. The empirical findings are discussed in the light of the IASB Conceptual Framework, IAS 36 impairment test, allocation of goodwill and the comparability between companies. Our study reveals that three of four companies has a strategy for allocating goodwill. It is also clear that comparability has been reduced by the introduction of IAS 36; all respondents agree and highlight the problem of subjectivity of the management.