Abstract To find out whether attesters and users of corporate financial reports have any consensus about the value of information included in published corporate annual reports for equity investment decisions, Professor Gyan Chandra surveyed 600 Certified Public Accountants randomly selected from employees of big eight accounting firms and 400 randomly selected Certified Financial Analysts. This article offers a different interpretation of the data reported in Professor Chandra's work. Based upon differences in the mean responses of the questionnaire, Chandra concluded that disparity between accountants and security analysts exists on the value of selected accounting information items for equity investment decisions. Authors have suggested that the observed differences may not be an indication of a lack of consensus on the value of these information items for equity investment decisions. Rather, the observed differences in the survey results may be a result of differences in the way in which these two different subject groups responded to the questionnaire.
Chen et al. (Fri,) studied this question.