The accounting treatment of intangible assets is a particularly complex and important topic for today's
economy, a knowledge-based economy. For today's companies, these assets become the basic drivers for success
and competitive advantage. They are an important part of the financial statements.
With the increase in the share and importance of intangible assets, the need for financial information of users of
financial statements has changed, and the current accounting system is struggling to cope with these
developments. Due to the uncertainty surrounding intangible assets, accounting cannot capture their growing
importance.
Consequently, investors or other users of financial statements cannot benefit from complete and relevant
information for decision making. Here are the basic questions for this paper: Does the accounting treatment of
intangible assets affect the relevance of financial information? And can this treatment lead to a misallocation of
resources?
The weakness of the current accounting system is that it cannot capture all the important intangible values. In
addition to attempting to answer the above questions, the purpose of this paper is to present the accounting
treatment of intangible assets in accordance with IAS 38.