The ability of financial information to be verified (verifiability) and applied to the benefit of users of financial statements, delivering consistently invariable results. In general, reliability refers to the trustworthiness and usefulness of the financial statements. In essence, reliability is a key characteristic for accounting information to be useful to major users in their decision making. Reliability represents the extent to which users can depend on accounting information as reflective of the transactions, conditions and events it purports to represent.

Reliability is not an absolute or rigorous characteristic of accounting information; rather, it is relative and contextual. In other words, accounting information must attain a specific degree of reliability to be useful to users of financial statements.

The main three characteristics of reliability are representational faithfulness (faithful representation), verifiability, and neutrality.