Financial Reporting Quality: Red Flags and Accounting Warning Signs

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

This report is written as a response to the monograph in which the ICAEW published on how financial accounting disclosures can be improved. The aim of this report is to critically discuss and evaluate the worthwhileness of the recommendations made from a financial investor’s perspective. It is done by reviewing recommendations put forward by the ICAEW and analysing if each of the disclosure recommended is worth the effort while putting in perspective what effects these recommendations have on professional investors who are one of the primary users and consumers of financial statements. The report contains information mainly from the ICAEW report and the CFA institute report

Baruch Lev and Feng Gu authors of “The End of Accounting and The Path Forward for Investors and Managers” indicate that over the past 110 years, the structure and content of financial reports has not changed, and that the role that these reports play in influencing the decisions of investors has greatly diminished. Lev and Gu make a case that non-transaction events that are not captured by the financial reports such as those disclosed through 8-k filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) have a greater impact on stock prices, and thus more useful to investors. In addition, they suggest that one of reasons for the decline in usefulness of financial reports stems from the increase of estimates that has made its way into these reports (Lev and Gu 2016).

SYNOPSIS: An extensive body of academic research in accounting develops theory and empirical evidence on the relation between earnings information and stock returns. This literature provides important insights for understanding the relevance of financial reporting. In this article, we summarize the theory and evidence on how accounting earnings information relates to firms’ stock returns, particularly for the benefit of students, practitioners, and others who may not yet have been exposed to this literature. In addition, we

Direct costs for the Ruger Clinic of Toledo, Ohio totaled $100,000 in 2007 and represents the total cost pool. The Ruger's uses direct cost allocation of expenses in the cost pool to three revenue-producing patient services. Drivers under consideration for the allocation of costs are patient service revenue (a direct dollar for dollar allocation) and hours of housekeeping services used (a volume-based activity for allocation). Drivers amounted to the following activity in dollars and volume, respectively:

In this paper we will discuss Walmart’s Balance sheet and Income Statement. We will analyze the company’s total assets at the end of the most recent annual reporting year and to why it is important. We then will talk about the company’s total assets, how much cash and cash equivalents did the company have, as well as, the amount of accounts payable at the most recent year, and from the previous year. What the company’s net revenues are from the last three annual reporting periods, the change in dollars in the company’s net income from the most recent annual reporting period to the previous annual reporting period. We will

The financial community in the United States has become increasingly concerned with the quality of reported company earnings.

Several main reasons for the occurrence of earnings management include influencing the stock market, growing management compensation, decreasing the possibility of violating lending agreements, and averting government intervention. It is believed that managers might attempt to manage earnings because they believe reported earnings impact investor and creditor decisions. In most cases, earnings management techniques are designed to improve reported income effects and to lower the company’s capital cost. However, in order to increase future profits, management might take the chance to report more bad news in low performance

Dechow et al. (2000) focus on firms with positive earnings and firms with zero forecast error to evaluate whether firms manipulate accruals and special items to beat the zero earnings benchmark. However, the result fails to establish a significant difference between the level of discretionary accruals and working capital accruals in firms that achieve the target and those that fall short.

This paper examines the quality of earnings for major corporations. The quality of earnings is an ongoing operation of corporations and other business alike, because the value of a business is the current and future earnings of the firm (Schroeder et al, 2011). These earnings are usually updated quarterly by a firm’s financial analyst, which provide this for investors and other users of financial information to make decisions about a firm’s financial position in the market. However, there are some differences in the quality of earnings throughout various industries, countries and by competitors. This paper evaluates the quality of earnings for one major corporation for an assessment of its current and future earnings.

Abstract. The article reviewed was Director Overlap, Ethical Financial Reporting, and Improvements in Disclosure Quality. The key of the abstract is to emphasize the positive influence of independent audit committee on the ethical financial reporting, corporate disclosure, and company ethical environment overall (p. 183).

Accounting restatement has been a hot subject for academic research since the recent high profile financial reporting failures. Much of the academic research on restatements has explored the causes and consequences of financial statement restatements (Kinney and McDaniel 1989; Dechow et al. 1996; Hribar and Jenkins 2004; Kinney et al. 2004; Palmrose et al. 2004; Desai et al. 2006; Karpoff et al. 2008; Plumlee and Yohn 2010; Schmidt and Wilkins 2011). This investigation is driven by the assumption that weak corporate governance partially explains financial reporting failures and accounting restatements (Abbott, Parker, and Peters 2004; Argawal and Chadha 2005; Srinivasan 2005). This paper extends the restatement literature by investigating

A quality of earning assessment is a tool used by analyst to determine the correlation between accounting income and economic income. The techniques to analyze accounting income and economic income include: comparing accounting principles, reviewing changes in accounting principles, analyzing discretionary and warranty expenditures, understanding replacement cost of assets and managements and auditors opinion of the company. A quality of earnings assessment of PepsiCo is applied to the various techniques to analyze accounting income and economic income.

In the underlying paper the author re-examines the conservatism principle and its asymmetric effects on earnings. With samples consisting of all firm-year observations from 1963 to 1990 with returns data on the CRSP NYSE/AMEX Monthly files and respective accounting data on the COMPUSTAT Annual Industrial and Research files, he formulates and tests four major hypotheses to find evidence for his predictions. At first he chracterizes “conservatism in accounting as the more timely recognition in earnings of bad news regarding future cash flows than good news”.1 In his first hypothesis he predicts a more sensitive response of earnings towards bad news in comparison to good news, proxied by negative and positve annual stock returns. His second prediction is that earnings are more timely than cash flow, indicating a stronger association of accruals to conservative accounting effects. Hypotheses three and four account for a test on the

test these cross-sectional predictions, we analyze the relation between discretionary accruals and investment for firms that are more opaque (higher R&D