The Impact of Law on Accounting Information System: an Analysis of IAS/IFRS Adoption in Italian Companies

Changes in accounting information systems (AIS) could be triggered by several factors, in this paper the authors consider the mandatory changes required by legislative measures. Previous researches have shown that companies have different behaviors when complying with the same law requirement and that some factors determine the companies’ different ability to seize opportunities coming from legislative acts. In this paper the authors investigate and interpret the impacts of two Italian law (L. 38/05; L. 262/05) on AIS: -by checking the accounting technological and organizational impacts, -by verifying the effectiveness of behavioral approaches, - by identifying the factors that could influence these approaches.