In order to mitigate the negative impacts on financial statements resulting from the Covid 19 pandemic, the Italian government intervened with regulatory measures to support companies that adopt national accounting principles. Among the benefits was the possibility of suspending the annual depreciation of tangible and intangible assets. Against this background, this study conducts an empirical analysis of the effects of the application of this temporary exception on the 2020 financial statements, the reasons that led companies to make use of the facilitation, and the use of the suspension in 2021 as well. A sample of entities, broken down by sector, was sampled. The basic assumption was that if a company in 2020 had no depreciation for at least one of the two categories of tangible and intangible assets and in 2019 had depreciation for these balance sheet items more than zero, it had utilised the regulatory measure of depreciation suspension. Subject of the analysis were the revenues per sector, the changes in tangible and intangible depreciation between 2019 and 2020 and the impact of the suspension on EBIT and operating profit.Finally, a retention analysis was carried out on 2021 in order to understand how many companies decided to use this kind ofregulatory measure also in the second year of the pandemic.
KEYWORDS: Impact, suspension, depreciation
