Towards Identifying and Disclosing Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital (IC) is one of the most valuable assets of firms, which has a significant role in success and wealth creation of the entities. Although these assets do not meet recognition criteria of accounting standards and are not reflected in financial statements, but they exist and the evidence indicates that they can affect managers, investors and other stakeholders’ decisions. It is expected that companies have incentives voluntarily report information about IC, due to the benefits thereof. Moreover because of the latest changes in the conceptual framework, we can expect acceleration in the movement towards recognition, measurement and disclosure of IC. In this article first we present the definition and the most important elements of IC, and then different ways of measuring this asset in accounting will be discussed. In rest of the paper incentives for disclosing IC will be presented, in order that the attention of the standard setters is attracted to the latest developments in this field and also the attention of investors becomes focused on this important asset of companies.