Abstract:

It is well known that the main objective of accounting is to build and report a true and fair view in the financial statements. According to accounting rules, this concept implies the application in good faith of all the principles. However, we cannot overlook the fact that there are more or less conflicting situations between some accounting principles, but also between some of them and true and fair view. In this paper, we focus on prudence principle and we aim that, starting from an analysis carried out on a number of articles and studies, to characterize the current state of the field related to the connection between true and fair view, prudence and financial reporting. Our study was conceived as a meta-analysis combining quantitative and qualitative research with a sample of 152 articles published between 1990 and 2017 in the Science Direct, Wiley and Taylor & Francis Journals databases.