True and Fair View or rzetelny i jasny obraz1? A survey of polish practitioners

Abstract The ongoing harmonisation processes with the European market (EC regulation 2002 on the application of International Accounting Standards, hereafter IAS) drive reforms in the Polish accounting framework. In 2000, the Accounting Act introduced significant changes to the 1994 Accounting Act, its predecessor. New accounting terminology and provisions based on the IAS framework were introduced and a substantial number of existing regulations modified. This paper outlines recent developments in Polish accounting and discusses their implications for the realisation of the True and Fair View construct (hereafter TFV). Legal changes (de jure analysis) are confronted with the insights from an exploratory study on the local operationalisation of the TFV construct. The questionnaire survey with Polish practitioners was conducted in the years 2000 and 2001. Then, follow-up interviews were carried out in order to validate the questionnaire data categorisation. Insights from the study raise issues of the (un)transferability of constructs such as the TFV across languages and culture though there is emerging evidence indicating that the current regulatory framework putatively supports the TFV concept. In practice, there appears to be a lack of consensus in translation and grammatical construction of the TFV concept, revealing a general local unfamiliarity with the substance of this ‘Western’-originated and constructed predominantly in the British and American context construct. The paper concludes that a Polish equivalent for the TFV as a multifaceted construct, a derivative of a hybrid experience, cannot be realised outside the localised Central and Eastern European reality in which it is situated, despite the new Europe discourse.