The accounting literature defines earnings management as “distorting the application of generally accepted accounting principles.” Many in the financial community (including the SEC) assume that GAAP deters earnings management. However, my opinion, which I have expressed in a letter to Chairman Levitt, is that earnings management results less from distortion of the application of GAAP than from the application of inherently faulty GAAP.
GAAP’s faulty design permits earnings to be managed in two ways. The first is by allowing businesses to report income they have not earned. For example, the FASB staff has called the pooling-of-interests method of accounting that follows a business combination essentially a means to report higher earnings without having to earn them. It is well known that financial report issuers prefer to report the highest income possible. That desire is tempered, though, by fears of attracting increased demands from a company’s stockholders and employees for higher dividends and salaries and from the government for more taxes; there’s also the risk that if the company presents too rosy a financial picture, that will lure new competitors wanting some of the gravy.
Those same financial report issuers, however, have no such reservations about trying to achieve stability of income reporting (also known as smoothing )—the fundamental goal of traditional financial reporting—which is the second way they manage earnings. Their wish for stability of income reporting far exceeds their desire for higher reported income. An example is the way companies have accepted income tax allocation, which both lowers and stabilizes reported income. University of Seattle Accounting Professor Loyd C. Heath, who won the first AICPA Wildman Award for 1978 for his research on the evaluation of solvency through financial reporting, keeps tabs on report issuers’ participation in accounting standard setting. Recently, he quoted a former FASB member who said 95% of the comments the board receives from companies fall into one of three categories: “Don’t make any changes; don’t move so fast; and don’t make income volatile—don’t let it fluctuate.”
HOW GAAP LEADS TO EARNINGS MANAGEMENT
During my recent correspondence with the SEC, Chief Accountant Lynn Turner characterized the issue raised by my criticism of GAAP as “how to make GAAP generate more transparent financial information.” Although he called the U.S. accounting system the best at providing “transparency to a reporting entity’s underlying economic events and transactions,” he said the SEC “would welcome [my] views on actions that might be undertaken” to improve transparency.
I therefore present here how I think tools for earnings management have been made part of GAAP and the only solution to these problems.
Although I find that Chief Accountant Turner’s statement about the quality of the U.S. system’s transparency represents a commendable objective, in my view U.S. GAAP as currently designed for two reasons fails pervasively to provide such transparency. Namely, the application of GAAP
Results in a company’s failure to report many of the underlying economic events that meet FASB’s criteria for events that should be reported. FASB Concepts Statement no. 2, Qualitative Characteristics of Accounting Information, lists 10 such criteria.
Introduces distraction into the U.S. accounting system that prevents transparency because it interferes with the portrayal of the events that GAAP does permit companies to report.
And GAAP fails to provide transparency in both these ways for one purpose—to manage earnings.
- See more at: http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2000/oct/whatdrivesearningsmanagement.html#sthash.htqC2Fyb.dpuf.