管理當局帝國建立與財務報表可讀性：論供應鏈會計師之影響

財務報表是由數字以及一連串的附註文字所構成，為外部利害關係人了解公司狀況的主要管道。透過文字的描述可使財報使用者能更加了解數字所代表的意義，因此，文字敘述是否具有資訊內涵為重要的議題。本研究以中文可讀性公式作為衡量指標，分析2013年至2018年台灣上市櫃公司財務報表附註揭露之可讀性與管理當局帝國建立動機之關聯。結果顯示，若公司存在高管帝國建立行為，則財務報表可讀性較差，但此一負向關係將會因為公司由供應鏈會計師查核而減弱。本研究結果提供明確的證據證明管理當局確實會利用較複雜或難以理解的表達方式來降低財報可讀性，進而達成掩蓋事實的目的；然而，供應鏈會計師因具備較佳的審計品質，可抑制管理當局進行此投機行為。

Financial statements comprise numbers and a series of notes, and they are the primary means through which stakeholders understand how a company is operating. Supplementing numbers with text help users of financial reports understand what the numbers mean. Therefore, in recent years, many studies have investigated whether such textual descriptions are informative. This study explores the relation between the readability of financial statement footnotes and managerial empires building among listed Taiwanese companies between 2013 and 2018. By using the Chinese readability formula to measure readability, we found that the more incentivized a manager is to build an empire, the less readable their firm’s financial statements are. However, this negative relationship is attenuated if the firm is audited by a supply chain auditor. Our findings provide new evidence that managers tend to use more complex and opaque expressions to make their financial statements less readable, thus achieving the purpose of concealing information from stakeholders.