Diploma thesis focuses on definition of investments both from economic (financial) and accounting point of view. It solves question of all institutional investors at financial market -- which assets to choose in order to have their investments placed in safe, profitable and liquid way. Besides question -- how to place the investments -- specific aspects of financial reporting under Czech accounting standards and International Financial Reporting Standards are discussed. Practical part analyzes actual financial investments of insurance companies operating at czech insurance market.

The thesis describes the financial background that prevails in the company Johnson & Johnson. It contains the most essential processes which are applied in the financial department. Each event is specified in theoretical way and also described in practical examples. Special attention is given to pricing policy, accountancy system and periodic financial closing.

The main content of this thesis is the assessment of a payroll system in the company XY. The theoretical part depicts all information regarding salaries. It describes the process from determining gross and net salaries that are paid to employees of every company. The practical part focuses on a specific company -- XY. At first, the company XY is described in great detail. This part is followed by a description of the rules and regulations employed in the company's payroll system. Part of my thesis is devoted to the International Financial Reporting Standards concerned with wages of employees, because company XY is obliged to follow these rules.

Diploma thesis deals with analysis of common requirements of mid-sized and major companies for financial reporting and with design and development of reporting tool which meets such requirements. The target of the thesis is to create the tool for financial reporting, which would be universal and allows user to set up by himself, easily and without interfering the source code, those parts of reporting tool which usually varies for different companies, so they can't be set both universally and precisely in advance. The tool is developed in QlikView environment, which provides many advantages for quality reporting. My contribution within this thesis is in the use of nontrivial practices and maximal utilization of QlikView environment possibilities in order to make the final financial reporting tool modular, parameterizable, expandable and applicable in any company environment and to enable it to transfer the role of reports set-up towards the user.

Over time, enterprises are more often turning to socially responsible business. Companies are doing so by various reasons: management decision, market and state requirements, efforts to raise the image on the market etc. However, CSR covers a wide range of activities and allows many different options of implementation. This thesis contains the analysis of the specifics of CSR in the Czech Republic, detection of the most advanced and omitted spheres. To achieve the goal of the thesis a survey was carried between companies that operate in the Czech Republic and have experience with social responsibility. Evaluation of the results brings out some positive changes in fundamental areas of CSR. Also the survey discovered the shift to more realistic perception of benefits arising from the implementation of accountability and sustainability in business activities.

Due to the lack of uniform financial reporting standards, size of the capital markets in the EU corresponded at the turn of the millennium to roughly half of those in the US. As a result, EU decided to introduce a uniform financial reporting standards which would be transparent, fully understood, properly assessed and effectively enforceable. As agreed in the secondary legislation, stock exchange companies from any of the member states become to be obliged to prepare consolidated financial statements in accordance with IFRS. IFRS have been primarily designed for the needs of the capital markets, continental accounting (icluding the Czech one) has been, on the other hand, focused on the protection of creditors, and also heavily influenced by the tax area. Correct application of IFRS requires accountants, who are well aware of the differences between the two systems. If and to what extent, stock exchange companies prepare their financial statements in compliance with IFRS, is examined in this paper. The aim of this paper is to introduce administrative and legislative process leading to the adoption of standards in the EU as well as at national levels, to introduce a system of IFRS comliance supervision and to identify the extent to which stock exchange companies are able to apply IFRS in their financial statements. The paper is divided into five chapters. Theoretical part includes a historical overview of the introduction of IFRS in the EU, overview of the legislation related to IFRS and supervision of IFRS compliance in the EU and in the Czech Republic. Last chapter assesses IFRS compliance in practice.

U.S. GAAP and the software industry in particular, are on the verge of a major alteration in revenue-recognition accounting standards. The IASB-FASB joint revenue-recognition project is due to be finalized over the next year with the result being a shift from a rules-based set of accounting standards to a principles-based standard. The purpose of this research is to examine financial statement preparers' software revenue-recognition decisions under a principles-based accounting standard compared to a rules-based accounting standard both with and without a personal incentive to maximize revenue. The 2 X 2 between-subjects experiment examines the revenue-recognition judgments and decisions of financial statement preparers involved in applying rules-based standards (U.S. GAAP) and a principles-based standard (IASB-FASB Exposure Draft: Revenue from Contracts with Customers) with and without a personal incentive to maximize revenue. The study included 127 experienced financial statement preparers with an average of 20 years of experience and 82% at a manager/director level or above. The results indicate financial statement preparers applying rules-based standards in a revenue-recognition scenario provide less accurate revenue decisions than when applying a principles-based standard. Moreover, the results did not show that a personal incentive influenced the financial statement preparers in their revenue-recognition decisions. Surprisingly, in the rules-based and principles-based scenarios where a personal incentive was not present, the arithmetic mean recommended revenue amounts were higher. In providing the amount of judgment required to determine the revenue to be recognized, there was not a statistically significant difference in the amount of judgment required between subjects applying rules-based standards and subjects applying principles-based standards. The arithmetic means for rules-based subjects and principles-based indicated some judgment however not significant judgment was required. This is interesting to note as so few subjects correctly answered the revenue amount and neglected to fully apply the guidance.

This dissertation contains two separate essays on the implications of the complex financial reporting rules of stock option compensation outlined under ASC 718. The first essay examines the effect of the tax benefit from employees' exercise of stock options on the cash effective tax rate. While not explicitly stated, many tax avoidance studies implicitly want to investigate tax avoidance that is the result of firms' intentional choices. Although stock option exercise reduces firms' tax burden, the firm does not control the timing of option exercise and the accompanying tax benefit. When the realized tax benefit deviates from the firm's expected cost, stock option exercise results in unanticipated changes in the cash taxes paid. The cash effective tax rate (CASHETR), a common measure of tax avoidance, reflects both the anticipated and unanticipated cash tax savings from employees' exercise of stock options. CASHETR's inclusion of unanticipated cash tax savings mismeasures intentional tax avoidance. Using both parametric and non-parametric analysis I show that the unanticipated tax benefit from employees' stock option exercise can cause firms to be identified as more aggressive tax avoiders. I also show that, among other differences, firms with greater unanticipated tax benefits from employees' exercise of stock options are more profitable, are less levered, have more extensive R&D, and have larger market-to-book ratios. Because these firm characteristics are often used as controls in studies of tax avoidance, the relationship between them and CASHETR's mismeasurement of intentional tax avoidance creates an endogeneity problem for researchers and could lead to incorrect inferences. I use a research simulation to inform researchers of an implication of this endogeneity concern when CASHETR is used to measure firms' intentional tax avoidance. I construct a hypothetical firm characteristic that is correlated to varying degrees with stock growth. This hypothetical firm characteristic represents a number of firm operating characteristics that could be variables of interest in studies of tax avoidance. Using a common model of tax avoidance, I test the null hypothesis that this hypothetical firm characteristic is not a determinant of tax avoidance. I show CASHETR's inclusion of the unanticipated tax benefits from employees' exercise of stock options leads to inflated rejection rates of the null hypothesis and can change inferences about determinants of intentional tax avoidance. Tax avoidance researchers can avoid the problems caused by the unanticipated tax benefit from stock options in two ways. First, they can use the effective tax rate for financial reporting purposes (GAAPETR). Because the financial reporting rules prohibit firms from including the unanticipated tax benefit from stock options in the calculation of the firm's tax expense, the unanticipated tax benefit from stock options does not affect GAAPETR. Second, researchers can use the excess tax benefit from the exercise of stock options disclosed by firms to adjust CASHETR to remove these unanticipated cash tax savings (CASHETRWITHOUT). The second essay in this dissertation examines the difference between firms' recognized and realized costs from stock option compensation. Under ASC 718 a firm recognizes the estimated value of stock options at their grant date as an expense for financial reporting purposes. This estimate often differs from the realized cost of the stock options, which consists of the cash proceeds forgone because the stock is issued to an option holder at a below-market exercise price. When ASC 718 was implemented, critics contended that these reporting rules allowed firms to avoid recognizing the full amount of wealth transferred from shareholders to employees. Consistent with this concern, I find that the realized cost of stock options exceeds the recognized cost of options for the median firm in my sample by $0.99 million, or 1.46 percent of pretax book income, in each year of my sample period. This translates into a wealth transfer from shareholders to employees in each year of my sample period of three cents per share in excess of recognized costs for the median firm. I also find that the realized cost from stock option compensation exceeds the recognized cost by $7.8 million, or 4.96 percent of pretax book income, in each year of my sample period for twenty-five percent of firms. The shareholders of these firms are transferring to employees 11.58 cents per share in excess of the recognized cost of stock options in each year of the sample period. Overall, these results suggest that firms using stock option compensation generally avoid recognizing the full realized cost of stock options.

Nowadays, sustainability has become a well-known and popular topic which has drawn the attention of many people worldwide. To fulfill their responsibility towards sustainability, the business world is shifting from an accounting-based accountability to an accountability-based accounting. Every renowned organization publishes their non- financial report, but quality of these reports is questionable. For the lack of a uniform structure, non-financial reports have become too complicated for some of the stakeholders to understand. To make things worse, the business entities publish non- financial reports highlighting their positive impacts but hide the negative aspects. However, these issues could not resist the interest of the stakeholders, rather they observe different independent index providers to know about the sustainability. We know non- financial reporting is not about figures rather it is about disclosures. However, it is very difficult to collect information from a non-financial report and compare them among industry peers. Therefore, we intend to examine if it is important to formulate a unique structure for the non-financial reporting.Though non-financial reporting is very different from financial reporting, it is very difficult for the readers to get the real picture of sustainability of any organization. The quality measurement of non-financial reports is a daunting task. To get a clear picture we collected the non-financial information of 12 automobile manufacturing groups from different geographical locations. We also observed 5 annual reports for each company and formulated our own index and conducted a quantitative study to answer our research question.We collected data from non-financial reports of our selected automobile companies to formulate our own index and collected index of these companies from the website of S&P Global. From the non-financial report, we also collected data about the length of the report, number of years compared for performance indicators, and if the report is audited or not. We collected the data about total asset of these companies and their return on asset.With the help of our theoretical framework where we discussed about CSR, stockholder theory, and legitimacy theory and formulated two hypotheses. To answer these hypotheses, we run a regression test to see if the variables used in our study have any predictable relationship or not. Hence we tested our data and concluded that it is important to formulate a unique structure for non-financial reporting.Non-financial reporting has come a long way since its appearance but to go even further and to fulfill the demand of the stakeholders, publishing such reports is not enough. Companies who publish such reports also need to ensure the quality and comparability. Though different organizations have different sustainability challenges, at least non- financial reports of a particular industry should follow a certain structure so that these reports can be compared.

Right information in the right time is one of the most important factors influencing business success. The needs of continually requirements on the information, on their structure, form and subject is compelled a rise of the instrument for their security – reporting, which has gained importance in all business activities especially in the sphere of economy and finance. The reporting is possible to consider as an important part of the information system with the help of this system are these reports published. The final users can use the information in the case of the satisfaction of their subjective needs. Business reports have to show trustworthy and righteous view of reported facts, which is the basic target of finance reporting.