To Örebro University

Sole traders are obligated, like all companies are, to report and document their financialstatements. This study aims to describe the sole traders attitude towards accounting and itslegislation and how they manage it in practice. The study also aims to examine if the soletraders is aware of and benefit from the simplified accounting standards as well as K1 thatwere enforced in 2007 and if not, what is the explanations? This is a qualitative studyconsisting of five semi-structured interviews. We can conclude, based on our research, thatthe sole traders almost solely produce their financial reports to comply with the Swedish TaxAgency´s demands. Because they have this point of view, the sole traders do not producemore financial information than necessary. Furthermore, this study shows that laws and otherpublications regarding accounting is given little or no attention by the sole traders. The soletraders in this study have no knowledge about the simplified accounting standards and K1.This is because there is no natural way for the respondents to obtain information withoutdoing so by themselves. Another contributing factor for the information loss is that therespondents are working on routine and therefore don't pay attention to legislation changes.Moreover, the control from the Swedish Tax Agency is considered to be low. This causes therespondents to argue that the usefulness of the information they collect do not exceed the costof collection when the risk of being audited is significantly low.