Required financial statement disclosures: Purposes, subject, number, and trends

A study categorizes, summarizes, and analyzes required financial statement disclosures. It is found that the disclosure purposes identified by the FASB are too broad to analyze the disclosure items. Thus, the study infers from the disclosures additional purposes and partitions the FASB purposes into finer categories. This results in identifying 17 specific purposes belonging to 6 primary ones. The findings include: 1. The most frequently required disclosures relate to amounts recognized in the financial statements, particularly to disaggregating them and providing relevant measures other than the measure in the financial statements. 2. Six subjects - stockholders' equity, leases, pensions, incomes taxes, other postretirement employee benefits, and commitments and contingencies - account for 43% of all disclosures, while 5 standards - SFASs 13, 87, 88, 106, and 109 - account for 28%. 3. Few disclosures explicitly provide information on future cash inflows or outflows. 4. Disclosure requirements have increased over the time; few have been eliminated.