An x-ray using NLP techniques of financial reporting quality in Central and Eastern European countries

This study assesses the quality of financial reporting in ten Central and Eastern European countries using a methodology based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques. 570 annual reports of companies listed on the main index on the stock exchanges of 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, over the period 2019-2023, were evaluated to determine the degree of convergence of the following four measurable qualitative characteristics: relevance, exact representation, comparability and understandability. The main objective is to identify consistency in the quality of accounting information based on the application of an international financial reporting framework. The applied methodology eliminates subjective variability by implementing a standardized scoring system, aligned with the criteria developed by NiCE, using libraries such as spaCy and NLTK for term extraction, respective sentiment analysis and word frequency evaluation. The results reveal significant heterogeneity in all characteristics examined, with statistical tests confirming substantial differences between countries. The investigation of relevance revealed partial convergence, with three dimensions achieving complete uniformity, while the exact representation showed the highest variability. The assessment of comparability showed a significant difference between countries' extreme values, and in terms of comprehensibility a formalistic approach was evident, with technical dimensions outweighing user-oriented aspects. The overall quality index varied significantly across countries, with a notable average deterioration in 2023, indicating structural vulnerabilities in financial reporting systems. These findings support initial hypotheses on the lack of homogeneity in the quality of financial reporting in the selected region, despite the implementation of international standards.