Cultural Context of Conservatism and Secrecy in Accounting

This study examines the relationship among the cultural values of Iranian society, disclosure and conservatism degree of Iranian firms in presentation of financial statements. It is argued that an empirical relation exist between the cultural value, as conceived by Hofstede’s theory of the four dimensions of cultural values (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity) and the accounting values are captured by Gray’s two dimension (conservatism and secrecy). 64 corporate annual reports registered on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) were examined in order to determine whether culture values correlate with the degree of conservatism and level of disclosure. The results in general support the theoretical expectations.