When Managing Earnings Becomes Illegal

Motivation is derived from an internal force that provides an individual the opportunity to achieve their needs or goals. People are motivated by a variety of things and often have different motivating factors. Employers should be mindful of individual motivating factors when attempting to motivate staff to increase performance. While some people may be motivated by money, many are motivated by things like: recognition, promotion, and increased responsibility. Once an employer has identified motivating factors they are able to analyze a variety of motivational theories to design and implement a program that will motivate employees to go above and beyond what is expected of them.

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

Review of ABC Company and the directions it is targeting. The strategy of the company is to lift the expected sales in an aggressive fashion, with the expected end target being to triple the current levels. The plan is to push sales into the targeted range of $3 million within 3 years versus the current amount which sits at $1.2 million. We will identify the perceived risk factors that may impact this aggressive strategy and its successful execution. The following will be those risk factors:

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.

Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) allow companies wide latitude in the choice of accounting policies. After a firm chooses a set of accounting policies, current accounting rules permit changes from one alternative policy to another at the discretion of the management. Since reported accounting figures are widely used by a number of external parties, managers of firms have incentives to choose accounting policies in order to influence the behavior of these parties. A variety of managerial motives for

There are a number of areas on the earnings statement that provide management with opportunities for influencing the outcome of reported earnings.

In this research paper the authors want to express their thoughts by stating that how to them earnings reporting pertains to the discovery of information that has not been disclosed by either people or other types of sources and focus towards the negative in this study. In my opinion, the title of the paper itself could have had a different title only because throughout the paper it analyzes negative or bad news rather than really paying attention to both perspectives. Also the paper captures the information or news that occurs by using a three day window in which Quarterly Earnings Announcement (QEA) take place and compares it to a period where it does not take place. Furthermore, in this paper there are three hypotheses that arise

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).”

Motivation is the force that makes us do things, whether accomplishing personal goals or completing tasks at work. Most people are motivated as a result of their individual needs being satisfied, which gives them the inspiration to perform specific behaviors for which they receive rewards (Kinicki & Williams, 2011). These needs vary from person to person, as everybody has specific needs to be satisfied. When we consider factors that determine the motivation of employees, many of us think of a high salary. This answer is correct for the reason that some employees will be motivated by money, but mostly wrong for the reason that it does not satisfy other needs to a lasting degree (Bizhelp24, 2010). This supports the idea that human

Does it matter what your competitors are doing? Step back and consider management’s incentives and choices. What is the motivation to manage earnings?

* 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.

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

Nowadays, as our economy is facing possible everyday crises, managers undergo an increasing pressure in order to keep their company 's earnings stable. Shareholders and analysts expect companies to meet forecasted goals and not to deviate from these. Especially, reliable companies are to report positive results and shall not present any 'surprises '. Managers therefore often turn to their accounting departments for help, whose job it then is to improve the bottom line by changing the information shown in financial

I soul searched my career path to ensure my thoughts and motivations were parallel. Although, I managed a call center for many years, often versioned quitting because the position lacked fulfillment in many areas. I realized I possess the ability to lead others and get encourage them to adhere to the rules of the organization, I also documented well, lead by example, was a team player, and encouraged others to do well. As I came to a conclusion, I stopped determine what motivated me in this position. Berry (2003) discusses intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems. Intrinsic rewards are motivations that offer