Does Attestation of the effectiveness of Internal Control over Financial Reporting Discourage Earnings Management? Evidence from China

Li Dang and Qiaoling Fang

Accounting and Finance Research, 2018, vol. 7, issue 4, 1

Abstract: To improve financial reporting quality, the Chinese government issued the Basic Standard for Enterprise Internal Control in 2008 and other related guidelines/regulations in the following years (hereafter China SOX). The scope of China SOX is broader but similar to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the U.S. Formal adoptions of China SOX requires management and external auditor’s report on the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting (ICFR). A company’s ICFR, if effective, should provide reasonable assurance that the company’s financial statements are reliable and prepared in accordance with the applicable accounting standards. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether China external auditor attestation of ICFR discourage earnings management, an indicator of financial reporting quality. By analyzing a sample of Chinese public firms during 2011 to 2013, we find that- (1) Chinese firms that disclose audited ICFR reports exhibit lower earnings management than firms that do not; (2) Chinese firms that are mandated to disclose audited ICFR reports exhibit lower earnings management than firms that voluntarily disclose audited ICFR reports. Our empirical results seem to suggest that attestation of the effectiveness of ICFR discourages earnings management and therefore improve financial reporting quality.Â

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/afr/article/download/13934/8691 (application/pdf)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/afr/article/view/13934 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jfr:afr111:v:7:y:2018:i:4:p:1

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Accounting and Finance Research from Sciedu Press Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sciedu Press ().