The Impact of Information Technology on Corporate Financial Reporting: A Contingency Perspective

Previous studies investigating IT impact on accounting suffer from a lack of theoretical guidance. An examination of the nature of information technology (IT), financial information and corporate financial reporting (CFR) indicates that the evaluation of IT impact on CFR requires a general, flexible and adaptive framework. Analogous to the contingency theory of organizations (CTO), this paper proposes such a framework. Its general assumptions are that the impact of IT on different aspects of CFR varies and the degree and pattern are contingent upon environmental, organizational, and managerial characteristics. Hypotheses have been developed to expand the framework. An evaluation of the framework against criticisms of CTO shows that it avoids several much criticized problems although care must be taken to ameliorate other pitfalls.