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Earnings Mgmt

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Earnings Management

The issue of earnings management is one of the most controversial topics in accounting. There isn’t one universal agreed upon definition for earnings management and different views tend to perceive it in different ways. What makes earnings management such a provocative topic is its direct link to earnings quality. Earnings quality is such an important factor to investors when coming to make their investment decisions because it reflects the integrity of the firm. The higher the quality of earnings, the more relevant and accurate the earnings figure become a reflection of the true financial position of the firm. We have seen many corporations manipulating their earnings using various earnings management techniques in order to report consistent and positive yet fictions earnings to their stakeholders, like for instance in the case of Enron.

This draws attention and suspicion towards earnings management and that is why the investment community is concerned with detecting earnings management behavior within corporations and seeing how managers can negatively use earnings management to report falsified information in their financial reports. This essay is aimed at showing how corporations intentionally use earnings management to deceive their investing public and what corrective action can be done to resolve this issue.

Some people argue that certain accounting behavior done by the firm which is perceived to be manipulative earnings management, is simply just a legal accounting choice/treatment with no intention of falsifying reported earnings. However what weakens this argument is the factual and statistical data showing how the quality of the financial reporting has been deteriorating in the corporate market and this links earnings management behavior to low earnings quality and fraudulent behavior. Also, I believe this argument is

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