Integrated report quality and earnings management – Evidence from South Africa

South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Integrated report quality and earnings management – Evidence from South Africa
 
Creator Eloff, Anne-Marie Steenkamp, Shené
 
Subject Accounting; integrated report quality; earnings management integrated report; report quality; disclosure quality; earnings management; earnings smoothing; South Africa; mandatory disclosure; discretionary accruals; EY annual Excellence in Integrated Reporting Awards
Description Background: No prescribed standard disclosure requirements for integrated reporting exist. Instead, the International Integrated Reporting Framework is widely adopted, which provides guidelines for integrated reporting to improve the quality of information reported to end-users. These guidelines, however, allow management a degree of freedom in implementing integrated reporting, making the quality of disclosure thereof dependent on management’s approach to reporting. In contrast to the purpose of integrated reporting stands the management of earnings where management can use judgement to manipulate financial reports to mislead end-users. The conflicting theoretical objectives of integrated reporting and earnings management (EM) pose the question of how these two variables relate to one another.Aim: We examine the association between the quality of integrated reports and EM.Setting: Our sample consists of 238 company-years from 2013 to 2017 that were listed as part of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) top 100 companies and were ranked on Ernst and Young (EY’s) annual Excellence in Integrated Reporting Awards. The likely association between integrated report quality (IRQ) and EM was identified based on theoretical frameworks, including the stakeholder and agency theories.Method: We perform a robust, one-way cluster regression on our main empirical model, measuring IRQ on rankings, determined by the annual EY Excellence in Integrated Reporting Awards and EM through discretionary accruals.Results: We find a statistically significant negative association between EM, measured as income increasing accruals, and IRQ.Conclusion: Results suggest that companies with income increasing EM activities are less likely to disclose higher quality integrated reports.
 
Publisher AOSIS Publishing
 
Contributor
Date 2022-09-13
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Empirical analysis, performing a one-way cluster regression on the main empirical model
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajems.v25i1.4581
 
Source South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences; Vol 25, No 1 (2022); 10 pages 2222-3436 1015-8812
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/4581/2580 https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/4581/2581 https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/4581/2582 https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/4581/2583
 
Coverage — 2013-2017 238 company years
Rights Copyright (c) 2022 Anne-Marie Eloff, Shené Steenkamp https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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