The opportunistic approach of the Positive Accounting Theory (PAT) fails to explain choices made at OGX: An anomalous situation?

Abstract

This paper has two objectives: (1) to demonstrate that the main accounting choices made by accountants and managers of OGX Company throughout its full business life cycle were not opportunistic, as often suggested by the hypothesis of Positive Accounting Theory; and (2) to demonstrate that these accounting choices may be better explained by the Theory of Corporate Scandals, by the Monitoring Hypothesis and by the Corporate Reputation Hypothesis. The research was conducted using a longitudinal case study approach, from 2006-2015, in order to identify visible accounting decisions in annual financial statements reports. It was found that the analyzed Company had the incentives to preform opportunistic accounting choices, such as the ones predicted by the PAT hypothesis and had also done through several situations in its business life cycle that could have influenced it to perform opportunistic accounting choices. However, there is no evidence that the Company ever made use of either opportunistic increasing-income accounting changes to impact their financial debt-covenants and bonus plan, or decreasing-income accounting to avoid government intervention, as suggested by the opportunistic approach of PAT hypothesis.

Keywords

• Accounting choices
• Earnings management
• Positive accounting theory
• Efficient approach
• Case study