Eighty eight percent of users of financial information in New Zealand believe that alternative performance measures (APMs) are useful or sometimes useful to assess company’s performance as a supplement to GAAP measures and 80.2% of them want APMs to be reconciled with GAAP measures, according to a survey conducted by the New Zealand External Reporting Board (XRB).
Of the 87 users surveyed by XRB, 68.7% believed that performance measures of a company should not be limited to GAAP measures and 56.3% said they use GAAP and APMs jointly. GAAP is used as the primary measures of performance by 20.7% of respondents, while 18.4% of respondents identified APMs as their primary measure.
Respondents’ main reason for using APMs was GAAP’s growing complexity and users’ difficulty in determining a company’s core operating business performance from GAAP financial statements.
However respondents expressed concerns on the lack of clarity and understanding over when APMs have been assured. While 74.7% of respondents thought APMs should be assured, many felt this would be difficult to achieve because of the lack of a standardised definition for the APMs.
The survey results can be accessed here.
