Irish local government accounts—general accessibility, complexity and confidence of financial statements narrative content

This article has two objectives: to evaluate the accessibility of local government financial reports; and to assess the readability, complexity and confidence of a narrative element of these financial reports. A custom scoring system is used to evaluate accessibility, the Bog Index is used to assess readability, and confidence is assessed using semantic variables representing complexity available within the LIWC software. The findings show accessibility could be improved, readability is good to average, and the text in the reports is not overly complex.