Book Description
Earnings management is a special issue in accounting theory, and the main impact of the practice is the creation of biases in financial statements. More specifically, earnings management affect accounting profits, and consecutively affect stakeholders in their decisions. According to the specialized literature, earnings management is a practice considered feasible by companies when they glimpse incentives to perform it, and incentives to the practice can be established by different reasons, so one may reasonably believe that enforcements rules of the environment is a special stimulus to the practice. As an example, unequal tax-rules between economic sectors can stimulate the practice of earnings management. So, our purpose is to verify if the legal enforcement by the government authorities created incentives to the earnings management in Brazil. To test the hypothesis, we selected a sample-data composed by Brazilian insurance companies, since this sector suffered a considerable increase in the income-taxes rate in 2008, moving the global rate from 34% to 40% of the accounting profit. Our sample consisted in 2.431 firms-years observations, in 28 quarters between 2006 and 2012. The utilization of this specific group had other important motive: according to Brazilian tax regulatory system, technical provisions from insurance companies can be considered deductible from income taxes. To consider the situation, we created a panel data model with changes in the level of the specified accruals during the selected time and included control variables for a better model specification. The results showed a significant relationship between the increased tax rates and the measure of the technical provisions, showing evidences of earnings management behavior in this industry specifically in the period which the tax-rate was increased for this group of companies.
