WORKING GROUPS

The BACH Working Group deals with the maintenance and further development of the Bank for Accounts of Companies Harmonized (BACH), a database built up by the European Commission in 1987 in co-operation with the European Committee, which provides comparable aggregated data on annual accounts of non-financial companies for a number of European countries, for Japan and for the United States.
Since the group experienced problems related with the database harmonization of the national accounts, it has been entrusted in recent years with the launch of a new database, BACH 2, which includes significant improvements (e.g. the provision of aggregated data based on the most recent sectoral classifications, the disclosure of coverage rates, the inclusion of comprehensive and harmonized descriptions of the national datasets…) .

The Working Group on the European Sectoral references Database (ESD) is in charge of developing and improving the database of statistical financial ratios for the sector of non-financial incorporated companies in selected European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain). The ESD database has been primarily developed as an additional tool for their risk analysis for credit and financial institutions.

The III Working Group primarily focuses on the impact of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), a set of accounting standards issued by the IASB, on the accounting for non financial corporations, trying to assess potential opportunities and risks. To that aim, the group has developed a standard format using the IFRS-GP XBRL taxonomy (defined by IASCF). Besides the III WG has created in cooperation with IASFC-XBRL team a databases of IFRS-compliant consolidated financial statements (ERICA) accessible to the public in the anonymous version. Its aim is to test the real use of IFRS by European corporations and assess its impact on them. For further information about this project and access, please click here.

The Risk Assessment Working Group was set up in 1987 to draw up a so called White Paper on corporate analysis in Europe and drafted reports on the analysis of stocks and flows conducted in the various central balance-sheet data offices. The group then expanded its project and, since 1999, its members have been working in cooperation with the related divisions of the European Central Bank, focusing on the homogenization of risk analysis tasks carried out by Central Banks concerning the corporations whose liabilities have been taken as collateral in monetary policy operations. The group has also carried out research on default prediction models and, jointly with the ECAF Task Force, has developed studies on technical details of the future ECAF (European Credit Assessment Framework).

The Study Group focuses mainly on the analysis of equity capitalization in an international setting.  It has yet produced three studies. The most recent one deals with Net Worth at Risk (NWaR), which was published in August 2005. NWaR is dealing with the minimum capital a company needs to absorb potential losses in a period of two years of crises.

Currently the group is doing supplemental research on NWaR, refining the concept as well as taken into consideration aspects of illiquidity resulting in a figure named Cash Flow at Risk. Current members of the group are representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain.