Legibilidade dos relatórios contábeis das empresas brasileiras de capital aberto: um estudo sobre os trechos que evidenciam "derivativos" e "hedge"

Abstract

This work sought to analyze the readability of the documents Management Report and Explanatory Notes published in 2017 by the 61 Brazilian companies that are part of the Bovespa Index (Ibovespa) in the year 2018. For this purpose, was extracted the readability index (1) of the sections that contained the word "derivatives" in the two documents per company, reserving an average index per document per company; (2) of the sections that contained the word "hedge" in the two documents per company, reserving an average index per document per company; (3) of the Management Report by company; (4) of the document Explanatory Notes, per company. The extraction of the indexes was done using the Flesch Readability Formula developed by Rudolf Flesch (1948). The results obtained showed that the legibility degree is considered to be easy for the documents, but when we analyze the specific sections, the legibility degree is classified as Difficult and even Very Hard for most companies. Two hypotheses were then drawn which related the size and level of corporate governance of the companies with the readability indexes and it was concluded that not necessarily larger companies have a high degree of readability in their documents, but companies with better levels of governance have a greater degree of readability.