Investigating the Impact of Corporate Governance Mechanisms on Financial Statements Fraud of the Listed Companies in Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

Corporate governance plays an important role in ensuring the quality of the financial reporting process. Many of recent corporate failures have been attributed to poor governance, which is manifested in fraudulent financial reporting and earnings mismanagement. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on financial statements fraud of the listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). To achieve this aim, Board Composition, Ownership Concentration and Institutional Ownership were used as corporate governance mechanisms. Furthermore, nineteen red flags of fraud extracted from auditing standard No. 240 along with Data Mining techniques such as K-Means clustering used to discriminate financial statements fraud cases. The data sample is restricted to 182 companies in the (TSE) during 1381 to 1393. In conducting this research, three main hypotheses were proposed to examine the impact of board composition, ownership concentration and institutional ownership on fraudulent financial reporting across the firms and during the designated period. Accordingly, the statistical technique known as the “Panel Data” was exerted to test the research hypothesis. The results of the hypotheses testing demonstrate that fraudulent financial reporting is negatively affected by proposed corporate governance mechanisms, after controlling for potential confounding effects.

Keywords

• board composition
• ownership concentration
• institutional ownership
• financial statements fraud