Case Analysis : Profit Management

When analysts question a firm’s earnings quality, it raises concerns regarding under or over aggressive accounting practices that may be allowing the firm to manipulate the earnings. Earnings quality is defined as the strength of the current earnings in being used to predict future earnings and cash flows. Since earning quality is indicative of future performance, analysts are more likely to address issues that have substantial impact on the earnings quality. An issue arises when the nature of the earnings is questioned. While permanent earnings are part of normal operations, any irregular, one time earnings can skew the earnings, making the firm look more profitable than it is. This is due to the inability to recreate similar one-time transactions that will give rise to such numbers. Investors prefer predictable

Understandably, there are a variety of ways in which a company can manage their earnings, and if accomplished successfully, the results can be highly profitable. Not all techniques are fraudulent, as effective earnings management is considered good for business and shareholders. Income smoothing is a specific example of permissible earnings management that involves controlling fluctuations in net income to make earnings less variable over a given period of time (Goel & Thakor, 2003). Smoothing is acceptable as long as it adheres to the restrictions of U.S. GAAP, which maintains that all revenues and expenses are accounted for in a defined fashion. There are a lot of incentives in figuring how to effectively smooth income, as substantial value can be created through the successful arrangement of financial transactions. Management is able to make more intelligent decisions with regards to the future of the firm if the earnings are able to match the forecasts. One instance this is seen is when management is faced with the decision to smooth total income or

Such an intense focus has been placed on quarterly earnings as an indication of a company’s success by everyone from analysts to executives that ethics have for the most part been thrown out the window, sacrificed to the all important number, i.e. earnings per share. This is the theory in Alex Berenson’s book “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America.” This number has become part of a game to be played, a figure to be manipulated – beat the number and Wall Street all but throws a parade, miss it and a company’s stock may be abandoned. Take into account the incentives that executives have to beat the number and one can find plenty of reasons to manage earnings.

We will now analyse motivations to improve remuneration disclosure using the theories of financial accounting. Accounting theories typically either explain or predict accounting practice or they stipulate unambiguous accounting practice.

New employment agencies dealing with temp and contract workers face no shortage of challenges regarding profit margins. You need to meet your overhead costs (office rent and supplies, admin, compliance, etc.) and ensure that your team is securing target numbers for placements made.

Like several companies, Nortel stipendiary their executives with stock choices (Collins, 2011). This compensation solely inspired the tendency to be but honest regarding the company’s finances. author closely-held stock choices that solely inspired his actions to fulfill or beat the benchmark set by analysts. If Nortel’s earnings showed to be higher than the benchmark, Nortel’s stock costs would rise creating the stock closely-held by management to be even a lot of valuable. By tweaking the books to indicate the road earnings price as critical the allowable accumulation price he created the stakeholders assume that the corporate was creating extra money than it had been. “Nortel ne'er incomprehensible a benchmark over the sixteen quarters (Collins, 2011).” it had been too tempting to bump the numbers up so the stocks gave the impression to be value over they were. “Nortel’s accounting practices junction rectifier to AN investigation by AN freelance review committee, that found that insubordination with accumulation and accounting fraud were undertaken to fulfill internally obligatory earnings targets (Collins, 2011).”

The objective of this research paper is to figure out weather earnings management is fraud.

Lay was not the only executive to be involved in a corporate accounting scandal. “Former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers borrowed” over four hundred million dollars from the company “that had improperly accounted for” nine billion dollars “and was forced into a” 2002 bankruptcy (Hoyle et al., p. 555). Moreover, there were many other large businesses that experienced corporate scandals in 2002, such as Adelphia Communications Corporation, Quest Communications, Tyco International, and others.

As stated in Exhibit 3, Earnings management is the managerial use of discretion to influence reported earnings. Within the accrual accounting system, managers have significant discretion with their firms’ accounting choices. Management has the ability to make choices that can opportunistically lead to higher or lower reported earnings. Richard 's and Ira Zar’s (CFO) actions would not change if these results were the result of GAAP flexibility because he violated the rules of accounting, the conceptual framework principle of neutrality in numerous ways to report the financial results that CA did under false pretenses. It would be one thing if CA garnered these results through legitimate business decisions versus using accounting tactics like changes in accounting estimates or outright fraud as in the use of the 35 day Month. The purpose of which was solely to allow CA to meet or exceed analysts’ estimates.

Spokane Industries has contracted Franklin Electronics for an 18 month product development contract. Franklin Electronics is new to using project management methodologies and have not been exposed to earned value management methodologies. Even though Franklin and Spokane have worked together in the past, they have mainly used fixed price contracts with little to no stipulations. For this project Spokane Industries is requiring Franklin Electronics to use formalized project management methodologies, earned value cost schedules, and schedules for reports and meetings. Since Franklin Electronics had had no experience with earned value management, the cost accounting group was trained in the methodology in order to bid for the

* With a focus on net income, managers could be incentivized to maximize ROE at the expense of other stakeholders, particularly bondholders. For instance, managers may fuel earnings growth by over-levering the company to benefit from tax shields in order to increase the value spread.  In addition, there are many other ways in which managers can manipulate earnings, for example, by slowing down depreciation charges or selling off assets to realize extraordinary gains.

We believe the new incentive system was needed and reasonable because the accounting-based incentive system, where EPS was a measure of performance, raised valid concerns. The first being an agency problem. This existed within the old system as manager’s interests were not aligned with those of stockholders. EPS had improved steadily at a rate of 9% annually; however, the share price had increased only slightly in comparison. Therefore, the company’s stockholders had hardly benefited. The second issue was the use of subjectivity in granting bonus awards. These awards were given out even when their entity had not performed well. Managers began “politicking”, meaning they would try and convince their evaluators they performed better than the results had shown.

In 1991, Liang Senior analysed the Chinese consumer market for a year and sensed that the rapid growth of the

Bonus contracts usually specify manager’s reward on the basis of earnings and share price. The rewards are usually under the form of cash, shares or options. However, on the other hand, this strategy somehow pressures managers to manipulate earnings to re-ceive bonus at the end of financial year. Healey (1985) suggests that managers’ adjust-ment of accruals is affected by income-reporting incentives of their bonus contract and that changes in accounting procedures are associated with modification of their bonus plan. Even if earning for one financial year is so low that nothing can be done to meet expectations,

One of the ways consumers can control this behavior using the Internet is sharing information about the standards they expect using social medias and podcasts. Since everyone can access the information if it is made public, the business leaders will see this information and will strive to live according to the standards set by their consumers. This will be an effective way because the business leaders will know that if they do not live up to the standards, the consumers may decide to use competitors’ products.