Los costos de Investigación y Desarrollo: Necesidad de contar con información homogénea

Currently financial statements do not provide enough information about intangible resources, which makes difficult the consideration of innovation activities as strategic variables. Intangible resources are not easily detected in financial statements: some are recognized as assets, other as expenses and some are not recognized at all. Specifically, most of R&D costs are charged to expense when incurred when they really represent investments. Important achievements have been made in the development of tools which help enterprises to manage their intangible assets. However, harmonized instruments that allow the homogeneus reporting on these resources, in order to facilitate the analysis of such information by external users do not exist. A significant first step to improve the accounting system would be the disclosure of quantitative broken down information about R&D costs, either when charged to expense when incurred, or when recognized as assets.