The impact of COVID 19 crisis on revenue recognition for telecommunications sector

One of the most intricate and debated subject in international financial reporting convergence program was and remains the Revenue recognition. After a long due process, the new IFRS 15 standard was published in 2014 and mandatory implementing from 2018. From here, 2020 adds multiples difficulties due to COVID 19 pandemic effects. In this context, from the same starting point we continued our previous endeavor into current times. Despite the new financial reporting standard “smartness” and high-quality content, the entities’ awareness and good understanding of the new standard’s main issues are crucial for successful implementation. Likewise, the business-model’s requirements and the way of caring them out are equally important. If in the precedent study we chose construction industry, now we extend the research to the telecommunications area – one of the most challenging sector – and we have considered the additional COVID 19 pandemic’s sudden, unpredictable, and complex effects, using the same research methods (comparison analysis and the theoretical pattern), in order to produce a chain of evidence and to reduce biases. The main objective was to demonstrate a common pattern of challenges and controversies from these two hot-impact sectors’ perspectives, alongside with the outcomes of the COVID 19 pandemic. We consider our effort to be helpful in finding the practical approach to improve the understanding and effective use of accounting information and to provide a value-added feedback to standard setters. Despite the inherent limitations of our research, we are confident that our findings originally contribute to increasing the knowledge of the relevant issues of financial reporting based upon IFRS and produce more “business light” to important global players.