Relationship between Audit Quality and Earnings Management to Meet Earnings Thresholds

Abstract

Different researches employ different empirical methodsto assess earnings management. One of the methods concentrates on profit distribution that refers to acts to meet or beat certain threshold. Promoting audit quality may cause improvement in quality of information, and in particular, in quality of assessing earnings. This study examined the relationship between the probabilities of meeting or beating certain thresholds of earnings, including loss avoiding, earnings reduction avoiding and negative earnings surprise avoiding, and audit quality, including firm size, tenure, and quality control point. The study used information from 101 companies for the period of 2005 to 2011 to analyze the respected relationship. The results showed that there is a significant negative relationship between probabilities of the earning management to meet or beat past year earnings and the two audit quality variables of audit firm size and quality control point. However, there was not significant relationship betweenthe earning management for loss avoiding and negative earnings surprises avoiding and the audit quality.

Keywords

• audit quality
• earnings management
• earnings thresholds