The Financial Accounting and Reporting Standards for Malaysia, Fourth Edition is a comprehensive guide that lays out the conceptual framework for preparing financial statements. In addition, it provides guidance on analyzing and interpreting financial statements. It also draws from local practices to provide a clearer understanding of how to prepare financial statements. This book also includes sample comprehensive disclosures of the MFRSs to help readers prepare their own financial statements.
It’s written by Tan Liong Tong, a member of the Malaysian Institute of Certified Public Accountants and a former Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Management, Universiti Putra Malaysia. Mr. Tong also served on several working committees of Malaysian professional accountancy bodies. He was a member of the MICPA Accounting & Auditing Technical Committee and the MIA Accounting and Auditing Standards Committee, and is currently a Technical Advisor to the MIA Financial Reporting Standards Implementation Guidance Committee.
The fourth edition has a number of improvements. The authors have simplified technical language, revised examples, and added Academic Perspectives sections at the end of each chapter. The new edition also contains shorter examples. It also contains references to research and journal publications. However, there are still some shortcomings.
As an example, if we look at Malaysian banks and Nigerian banks, the former exhibit better earnings quality than the latter. This is because Malaysian FRSs are IFRSs-compliant and prescribe stricter rules compared to Nigerian SASs. This shows that there is a significant relationship between accounting standards and banks’ earnings quality. However, MFRSs do not produce similar results with NSASs.