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"The growing number of mergers and acquisitions over the past few years has led to the increasing presence of goodwill in balance sheets. Intangible items are also more and more important. However, accounting standards concerning intangibles are not homogeneous. Two indexes: the ""tendency to prudent disclosure"" and the ""tendency to secrecy"" have been created to identify the financial accounting and disclosure choices related to intangibles. The latter original index is an index of disclosure, which is converted to an index of ""tendency to secrecy."" Two different worksheets are developed to evaluate the extent of these tendencies. The ""tendency to prudent disclosure"" and the ""tendency to secrecy"" indexes are calculated (for each firm) from annual reports of 417 German, French, and US firms from four different activity sectors."