The New EU Accounting Directive – A Comparison of Reporting Requirements

The adoption of Directive 2013/34/EU constitutes the materialization of a modernization process of the Directive 78/660/EEC and Directive 83/349/EEC that has started in 2009. The new accounting directive replaces the two accounting directives and sets the requirements for both individual and consolidated financial statements. It also introduces a new category of entities “micro-undertakings” in order to implement the requirements of Directive 2012/6/EU. The paper tries to summarize and compare the typologies of enterprises and groups defined in the old and new accounting directives as well as in the Romanian accounting system (RAS). It also compares the requirements of both the new and the old accounting directives as well as RAS regarding the structure and presentation of the annual financial statements. European Union (EU) wide, about 99% of the enterprises fall into micro and small categories and might benefit from the simplifications of preparation and publication requirements of the annual financial statements. They will also be exempted from the requirements of auditing their financial statements. Only 1.21% of the enterprises in Europe will be classified as medium and large and will be required to prepare and publish a full set of annual financial statements and to audit their financial statements. If Romania will opt for reducing the administrative burdens for micro entities and implement simplifications for micro-entities as they were defined in the EU directive 2013/34/EU, the thresholds would have to be dramatically increased and many more enterprises will be reclassified as micro instead of small or medium enterprises.