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The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relation between tax reporting and financial reporting, their influence on transparency, and empirical implications.

Krull (2004) finds that US multinational corporations (MNCs) increase amounts designated as permanently reinvested earnings (PRE) to maximize reported after-tax earnings and meet earnings targets. We extend this research by examining the relationship between executive equity compensation and the opportunistic use of PRE by US MNCs, and the market reaction to earnings management using PRE designations. Firms use equity compensation to incentivize executives to strive for maximum shareholder wealth. One unintended consequence is that executives may engage in earnings management activities to increase their equity compensation. In this study, we examine whether the equity incentives of management are associated with an increased use of PRE. We predict and find strong evidence that the changes in PRE are positively associated with the portion of top managers' compensation that is tied to stock performance. In addition, we find this relationship to be strongest for firms that meet or beat forecasts, but only with the use of PRE to inflate income, suggesting that equity compensation incentivizes managers to opportunistically use PRE, especially to meet analyst forecasts.

Further, we provide evidence that investors react negatively to beating analysts' forecasts with the use of PRE, suggesting that investors find this behavior opportunistic and not fully convincing. This chapter makes an important contribution to what we know about the joint effects of tax policy, generally accepted accounting principles, and incentive compensation on the earnings reporting process.

This study aims to provide insights into US and Australian analysts' views regarding the relative importance of disclosing the direct method (DM) or indirect method (IM) statement of cash flows and forecasting firm performance.

Evidence is collected from responses to 104 surveys and 52 interviews completed by US and Australian analysts from 2017 to 2022. The survey and interview questions are developed with reference to the literature.

US and Australian analysts believe that the DM format provides incremental benefits compared to the IM for (1) confirming the reliability of earnings; (2) improving earnings confidence; (3) more accurate ex ante forecasts of operating cash flow and earnings; and (4) identifying opportunistic accruals manipulation. Analysts view that DM disclosure can lower firm-level cost of equity, although US interviewees more uniformly expect lower costs of equity under DM disclosure when firms yield low earnings quality. DM disclosure is also more important during unstable economic periods, as proxied by COVID-19.

Limited research currently exists regarding disclosure of the DM or IM and its impact on analysts' forecasting accuracy, earnings quality, economic uncertainty and cost of equity. Previous research has relied on archival research to examine differences between the DM and IM methods and are limited by data availability. Our findings are particularly relevant to the US market with few US firms reporting the DM format.

This study examines the association between internal corporate governance mechanisms (i.e. board of directors and audit committee) and the information value of bank earnings. The authors comparatively assess this association across different bank types, Islamic versus conventional banks. The authors also investigate the mediating effect of Shariah governance.

The authors utilize a unique and an international sample of 723 bank-year observations representing 100 listed banks from 16 countries during the period 2007–2015. The authors investigate the characteristics of the board of directors and audit committee (i.e. size and independence) and employ three core analyses for earnings informativeness (i.e. earnings persistence, cash flow predictability and reliability of loan loss provisions). Additional analyses address Shariah supervisory boards’ (SSBs’) size, financial expertise and multiple outside directorships. The authors use the random-effect Generalised Least Squares (GLS) estimation technique and provide several robustness checks and sensitivities.

The authors find that, on average, having large and independent boards (and audit committees) increases the informativeness of reported earnings for banks. Conditional on bank type, our results report strong evidence for differential effects across the two alternative banking systems. In Islamic banks, large and independent board of directors (and audit committees) is positively associated with all measures of information value. There is insignificant evidence for conventional banks. However, SSBs show no significant effect on the reported earnings’ informativeness.

This is the first study, to the best of our knowledge, that empirically and comparatively assesses the information value of reported earnings in association with effective internal governance while recognizing the institutional characteristics of different bank types. The authors offer new insights to policymakers, investors and other stakeholders located within countries operating on a dual banking system. The results could help regulators to improve their rules/guidance related to double-layer governance and financial reporting quality.

This study aims to examine how firms choose an auditor in the presence of bilateral information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders regarding firms’ economic performance.

This study presents a one-period reporting bias game with a firm’s risk-neutral manager and investors in the capital market, in which a manager with private information chooses an auditor and reports earnings to investors who acquire their own information. The analysis focuses on the possibility that the manager engages an auditor to constrain earnings management as a commitment device to minimize reporting error cost.

The results show that the manager’s optimal auditor choice is determined based on investor sensitivity to the earnings report, and managerial incentives for earnings management, discounted by the uncertainty of reporting errors. The results for optimal auditor choice are counterintuitive: engaging a higher-quality auditor could seemingly be associated with aggressive earnings management.

This study advances the understanding of the theoretical basis of firms’ auditor choice in the context of market investors’ information acquisition when auditors exercise their discretion in reporting. This issue has received limited attention in the extant literature.

Charting the earnings numbers reported by Korean firms produces a bell curve, but for a sharp discontinuity in the area surrounding zero. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if and how a large segment of Korean managers might manage accounting numbers to produce the observed result.

This study adopts an empirical research method using Korean listed firms as a sample. The primary focus of investigation is on major income statement variables that might produce the observed results in earnings from operations and net income.

Managers of Korean firms opportunistically use almost all income statement variables to influence earnings numbers. They manage revenues and selling, general & administrative expenses to report small positive earnings from operations, but manage non-operating gains (losses) to report small positive net income.

This paper does not answer several questions related to loss avoidance. First, the paper did not examine which actions, such as discretionary accruals, opportunistic business decisions, or bogus transactions, were employed to affect line items on the income statement. Second, the paper did not investigate what specific incentives trigger Korean managers to report small positive earnings. Korean firms have traditionally raised capital by borrowing funds from creditors and governmental agencies. Thus, they may be concerned that reporting losses would reduce their borrowing capacity. Finally, corporate governance, such as CEO tenure and option grants may influence the extent of earnings management to avoid losses, but most corporate governance data for Korean companies must be manually collected. Accordingly, these subjects are left for future studies as well.

This study contributes to accounting literature by reporting how managers of Korean firms artificially coordinate major income statement variables and report small positive earnings figures, noting the differences between earnings management investigating methodology and ones used in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to assess respondents' perceptions of the quality of reported earnings in Egypt. To this end, three main issues are investigated: first, the potential incentives for engagement in earnings manipulation; second, the techniques most frequently used in manipulating earnings; and finally, the actions required to improve the quality of accounting information, including the reported earnings.

A total of 16 semi‐structured interviews are conducted in order to uncover any undisclosed issues and to supplement the results provided by a questionnaire survey distributed among three groups of respondents, namely, accounting academics, external auditors, and financial managers.

The results indicate that the main incentives for manipulating earnings in Egypt are to enhance the chances of obtaining a bank loan; to sustain last year's profit performance; to report profits and to avoid reporting losses; and to achieve high‐share valuation. The results also demonstrate that making inadequate provisions; capitalising rather than expensing expenditures; and overestimating the inventory value are the most frequently used techniques in earnings manipulation.

The results could be of assistance to Egyptian external auditors and regulators in their attempt to limit the incidence of earnings manipulation.

With a few exceptions, most of the literature on earnings management has been based on the US data. Therefore, research undertaken in a country such as Egypt, where the environment in many respects is different, may reveal a different perception of the quality of reported earnings and help determine how preparers in Egypt can further improve the quality of reported earnings.

The paper aims to examine the rounding phenomenon in reported earnings and revenues of Japanese publicly listed firms to achieve key reference points. The paper also examines the changes of rounding behavior among Japanese publicly listed firms around the asset bubble burst in 1990.

To test the null hypothesis of no managerial effort to round earnings and revenues, the paper compared the observed frequency of each number in the second place of earnings and revenues numbers to the expected occurrences of the number as predicted by Benford's law.

The paper finds that rounding manipulation is prevalent in the reporting of both earnings and revenues among the firms. The paper also documents that rounding manipulation is more severe in reported earnings than that in reported revenues. The paper finds constant rounding manipulation behavior in reported earnings upon the asset bubble bursting in 1990; however, the magnitude of rounding manipulation in reported revenues decreases significantly after the bubble burst. This finding supports the argument that Japanese firms tend to focus more on short-term performance in the post-bubble era.

This paper is the first study to focus on rounding behavior in reported revenues of Japanese firms. As important as the earnings are on firms' valuation and contractual measures, revenues deserve intensive awareness in the financial studies. The study also explores the changes of Japanese managers' rounding manipulation behavior since the asset bubble burst in 1990. Documentation of the structural changes in the lost decades in Japan can provide valuable lessons for other countries in similar situations.

Previous literature on earnings management (EM) indicates that managers are motivated to adjust reported income to serve their own self-interests, and to try and influence capital markets. However, previous research has failed to provide an appropriate theoretical underpinning for EM and has ignored the effect of cultural and environmental factors on shaping managers’ motivations. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to draw on interpretive methodology and new institutional sociology (NIS) theory to identify the external factors that motivate managers of Egyptian companies to use EM to modify financial statements.

The research adopted an interpretative methodology and interview methods. Interviewees were conducted with 34 participants, who were divided into four different categories; executives, financial analysts, auditors and stock exchanges’ authorities.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the range of external factors that motivate Egyptian corporate executives to adjust the earnings number in financial statements. These external factors include the expectations of investors, lenders and employees, the impact of stock exchange listing rules, beating an earnings target, and the privatisation of key state-owned companies.

The authors recognise that the paper has a number of limitations. The research is concerned solely with EM in Egypt and, therefore, it would not be safe to generalise the results to other contexts, even in the Middle East. Further research on the behaviour of managers towards EM in other countries would be useful to test validity of the results reported in this paper.

The principal contribution of this paper is to build on the previous EM literature to include external factors within the Egyptian context which motivate Egyptian managers to manage the earnings of companies in an upward direction. It adds additional EM motives to available literature including: employees, stock exchange’s rules, privatisation and meeting industrial norms. Also, the paper provides evidence of the effect of concentrated share ownership on managers’ likelihood to engage in EM behaviour. The paper also extends NIS theory to recognise the importance of the interplay between institutional and economic environment by including economic reform, and non-financial providers as factors that can explain the EM behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether aggressive pro forma earnings-reporting firms are difficult in relation to signalling sufficient intellectual capital (IC), and how the market reacts to aggressive pro forma earnings reporting.

Content analysis of 610 annual reports of Australian firms listed on the Australian Securities Exchange 200 is used to obtain IC information. Fixed-effects logistic and ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are used to examine the hypotheses.

The study finds that aggressive pro forma earnings reporting is negatively and significantly associated with sufficient IC disclosure. Moreover, this paper finds that investors react favourably to aggressive pro forma earnings reporting, and believe that pro forma earnings have greater incremental value-relevance information than statutory earnings.

The coding framework used in this study comprises 33 IC items. Other studies have used coding frameworks comprising fewer or more varied IC items. Therefore, when comparing the results of this and other studies, the interpretation of the findings must recognise the differences in approach.

Sufficient IC disclosure may help investors to distinguish high-reporting-quality firms and low-reporting-quality firms. The paper demonstrates that aggressive pro forma earnings-reporting firms, which are low-reporting-quality firms, are less likely to disclose sufficient IC.

This paper is the first to examine the relationship between aggressive pro forma reporting and IC disclosure. Moreover, this paper built a theoretical framework based on signalling theory to develop research hypotheses, which extend the research on IC underpinned by signalling theory.