Valore dell'informativa prospettica nelle determinazioni di azienda

[Autom. eng. transl.] The ultimate goal of business activity is the production of new wealth, as a tool for satisfying human needs. The process of technological and IT development, as well as the most recent evolutions of corporate governance models, allow the most advanced private and public companies to include among their goals a direct contribution to the economic development and social and environmental progress of the community in which they are located. The above premise forces a reflection on the techniques of value appreciation. The approach must necessarily be prospective and stochastic, rather than historical-conclusive, in order to intercept, also through estimates and conjectures, the potential, often latent, offered by the most virtuous companies, without forgetting their contribution to the environment, that is, to the community, in other words also to the economic and social development of a country. The financial statement, based on prudential logics specific to the legislator, cannot fully reflect the principle of informative utility, especially if one wants to include the many and different categories of stakeholders (since the methodology of "historical values" is the least rapid in reacting to new expectations and forecasts), if not through adjustments to the traditional descriptive documents of the financial statement, such as the explanatory notes and the management report, which for some years have been increasingly integrating with prospective information on future management. In order to develop the application of market value or current value to accounting, many doctrinal proposals have been undertaken (...). The use of "current values" in financial statements, starting from the nineties of the last century, has also aroused the interest of professional practice, as can be seen from a series of publications by official sources such as, in the USA, the Financial Accounting Standard Board and the Security and Exchange Commission. It would seem that the current value can be replaced in conditions of uncertainty by the current value, on the assumption of market efficiency. The objection to this possibility of substitution lies in the concept that every investment or disinvestment decision requires a subjective, as well as objective, evaluation. Italian accounting doctrine has had to insist on the principle of ‘different evaluations for different purposes’, in order to oppose the claim to validate the same evaluation or the same balance sheet for different purposes, even when such purposes require different knowledge and therefore different evaluations and balance sheets. From this derives the value of knowledge and information. Financial statements already incorporate estimates and conjectures relating to internal company conditions and external environmental conditions; this means that the determination of operating income and cash flow may undergo significant deviations when the evaluations are implemented by different operators, with different degrees of information. Market proponents believe that the binary process of supply and demand, typical of negotiations, manifests a self-regulating and stabilizing motion, and therefore offers more reliable evaluations than company operators, despite the fact that the latter may have more extensive and specific information at their disposal, but may also be driven by conflicts of interest. It is generally accepted that only data that has the potential to change an operator's expectations about the occurrence of a specific event constitute information, or significant information. The 'value of information' has its roots in the 'degree of confidence' in the expected utility. More precisely, the value of information is given by the difference between the utility obtained by using the information and the utility achievable without information. Clearly, the value