Financial reporting in the small firm: Is the Financial Reporting Standard for Smaller Entities (FRSSE) a help or a hindrance?

This project aims to create a more academic analysis, building on existing practitioner and professional literature, of the merits and de-merits of FRSSE (Financial Reporting Standard for Smaller Entities) adoption by UK SMEs. Adoption of FRSSE will be treated as amenable to cost-effectiveness analysis (Friedlob and Plewa, 1992), focusing both on a variety of costs (eg compliance costs, opportunity costs) and a variety of benefits (eg superior financial performance, greater flexibility) (eg Jackson, 1997).
It aims to build on earlier attempts to gauge the costs/benefits of FRSSE by the likes of McAleese (2001), Murphy and Page (1998), and ICAS (2002). Our project is of greater detail and scope, adopts an explicit cost-effectiveness methodology (Friedlob and Plewa, 1992), and extends treatment from the accounting practitioner base to SMEs more generally. Further, it involves a radical advance, in terms of instrumentation, statistical methodology and analytical framework.
In essence, the proposal is to create two new instruments for measuring the cost-effectiveness of FRSSE in a UK context (CCAB, 1996); a postal questionnaire and an administered questionnaire. Using the FAME database as a sampling frame for UK SMEs, 2,200 questionnaires will be sent to SMEs and accounting practitioners in the UK. Key issues addressed will be: features of FRSSE users, benefits and costs of FRSSE adoption, structural change of FRSSE, and prospects of (and needs for) an international FRSSE.