مدیریت سود، گزارش سالانه و مقایسه پذیری حسابداری Earnings Management, Annual Report Patch and Accounting Comparability

۱٫ Introduction A report patch is a unique phenomenon in China’s capital market. Chinese scholars often equate it to financial restatements in the study of issues about a report patch, and study the phenomenon of report patch on China’s capital market based on foreign literature reviews about financial restatements, but they do not deny that there are still some differences between the financial restatements and report patch. Financial reports of listed firms in the USA are publicly disclosed through the SEC’s electronic data system (EDGAR). When financial restatements happened, the restated financial reports take the place of the original financial reports by the listed firms, while Chinese listed firms primarily supplement and correct the original financial reports through publishing temporary reports, such as a supplementary report, a correction report and reports of supplement and correction. The original financial reports aren’t replaced, so these temporary reports are realistically called a “Report Patch”. (Wei & Wang, 2007; Wang & Wei, 2008). Existing studies show that implementing earnings management can lead to a report patch, the report patch can have an impact on accounting information quality, but existing studies only examine that the relationship of accrual earnings management and report patch, and the impact of a report patch on accounting information quality understood by investors (such as ERC). The relationship of real earnings management and report patch and the impact of report patch on accounting information quality itself have been researched systematically so far. This paper incorporates earnings management, report patch and accounting comparability into a research framework to study the effect of different earnings management activities to a report patch and the effect of the report patch on accounting information quality itself. We believe this study may help individual or corporate investors to better understand accounting information quality and Chinese capital market, also have more significant impact for regulatory authorities strengthening the supervision of earnings management and the report patch. The rest of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 discusses the literature review and commentary. Section 3 is the theoretical analysis and empirical research hypotheses. Section 4 describes the research design. Section 5 presents the empirical analysis results. Section 6 concludes. ۲٫ Literature Review Kinney and McDaniel (1989) find that the sample companies that restate quarterly earnings in prior periods have a smaller scale, poor profitability, high debt ratio, slow growth and other economic characteristics relative to other companies in the same industry. Chen (2005) finds that when the performance of the patch companies is getting worse, gross profit grows slower, debt ratio is higher and the quality of information disclosure is relatively poor. Abbott, Parker and Peters (2004) and Li and Chen (2006) find that the Audit committee and Financial Statements Restatement (patch bulletin) shows a significant negative correlation. Eilifsen and Messier (2000) think that whether setting the internal controls and whether the internal control operates efficiently or not, the external auditor’s competence and diligence level can have an impact on the financial statements restatement. Romanus, Maher and Fleming (2008) find that the auditor’s industry expertise helps to reduce the likelihood of financial statement restatements. Zhou (2007), Shang, Zhou and Bai (2013) and Wen, Zhang and Li (2012) studies’ results indicate that checks and balance on a controlling shareholder independent director system can play an inhibitory effect on the annual report patch. Zhang and Ma (2011) and Ma and Zhang (2012) show that ownership concentration and the percentage of outstanding shares have a significant negative effect on the possibility of a report patch, while state-owned shares will significantly improve the possibility of a report patch being published, with the possibility between shareholding ratio of management and report patch presenting a U-shaped relationship.