Reading Between the Lines of Corporate Financial Reports: In Search of Financial Misstatements

This book provides a digestible step-by-step guide to reading corporate financial reports, drawing upon real-life case studies and examples of corporate collapses and accounting scandals, and applying practical tools to financial statement analysis. Appealing to a range of practitioners within corporate finance including investors, managers, and business analysts, this book is the first to specifically address the challenges facing those who are not professional accountants and auditors when examining corporate financial reports.Corporate financial reports are used widely by managers, investors, creditors, and government agencies to examine company performance and evaluate potential risks. However, although seemingly an invaluable source of information for managerial decision-making, financial reports are often based on rough simplifications of a very complex reality. With no way of avoiding deliberate manipulations and fraudulent activity, these statements cannot be relied on completely when selecting stocks or evaluating credit risk, and therefore poor analysis can lead to potentially disastrous investment decisions.The author suggests that in order to effectively interpret corporate financial reports, we must 'read between the lines' to accurately assess a company's economic performance and predict its long-term viability.

About the Author

Jacek Welc is an Assistant Professor at Wroclaw University of Economics, Poland, and a Lecturer in Corporate Finance at SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences, Germany. From 2003 to 2007, he was an independent consultant in the areas of corporate valuation, management accounting, and financial accounting. Having also been Head of the Corporate Finance Department at Dexus Partners, Jacek now co-owns a consultancy specialising in corporate financial services called WNP Ekspert. He has written and published a number of articles, as well as a book entitled Applied Regression Analysis for Business: Tools, Traps and Applications (Springer, 2017).