Creative accounting: Some ethical issues of macro- and micro-manipulation

Catherine Gowthorpe and Oriol Amat ()

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: This paper examines two principal categories of manipulative behaviour. The term 'macro-manipulation' is used to describe the lobbying of regulators to persuade them to produce regulation that is more favourable to the interests of preparers. 'Micro-manipulation' describes the management of accounting figures to produce a biased view at the entity level. Both categories of manipulation can be viewed as attempts at creativity by financial statement preparers. The paper analyses two cases of manipulation which are considered in an ethical context. The paper concludes that the manipulations described in it can be regarded as morally reprehensible. They are not fair to users, they involve an unjust exercise of power, and they tend to weaken the authority of accounting regulators.

Keywords: Accounting ethics; accounting regulation; creative accounting; earnings management; financial reporting; macro-manipulation; micro-manipulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/748.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

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:upf:upfgen:748

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).