Influence of International Financial Reporting Standards on Earnings Management: Comparative Study of Pre-Post IFRS Era in Malaysia

Abstract

Purpose—The motive of this study is to examine the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and to investigate the influence of its introduction on earning management in the companies (registered as public listed companies) of Malaysia, as the idea of IFRS is to make the statements of the companies more transparent and comparable. Design/Methodology/Approach—100 firms listed on Bursa Malaysia (Stock exchange) were taken for the sampling of data and were investigated to examine the quality of accounting information. In this study, the motive was to evaluate and measure the Earning Management Score (EMS) with respect to the context of Malaysian listed companies. It is based upon cross-sectional study which was introduced by Kothari et al. (2005) and later modified by Jones. The discretionary accruals in this study are evaluated on the basis of the historical estimations of the industry. Findings—The findings of this research suggests that IFRS influences the recognition of the losses in financial statements which depends upon the disclosure requirements and also the relevance of the financial data. Research Limitations/Implications—Every research is bounded by certain limitations. Similarly, in this study there were also few limitations encountered. Firstly, this study covers only one aspect of IFRS which is observance of the intensity of Earning Management, Therefore the conclusion is drawn towards that respective aspect only. Also, the EM (Earning management) is not only and always apprehended via the accrual models, so in future reference other models can be used as well. Finally, this study was based on cross-sectional approach which assumes that all the firms in the industry tend to have same accruals. Whereas, in reality companies differ from each other in structure, characteristically and in all aspects.