회계감리가 기업의 이익조정에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

This study aims to test whether the audit report review by Financial Supervisory Service of Korea(FSS) actually restrains the opportunistic earning management behaviors of firms. Audit report review is purposeful to enhance the reliability of accounting information, protect interested parties and contribute to the sound development of companies. To know the actual impact of the audit report review serving for those objects, we estimate the levels of earnings management before and after the review that the sample firms had, and examine the differences through univariate and multivariate tests. If we find the realized impact of audit report review on the sample firms which reduces the level of earnings management by the firms after the review, we will verify the effective role of the service and help out to discuss the ways to expand the effect over all firms in the market. The sample firms include the firms which had audit report reviews by FSS between 2002 and 2008. We devide the samples into the firms without enforcement actions and the firms with enforcement actions as results of their audit report reviews, and compare their earnings management behaviors before and after they had the reviews respectively. As a result, we find that the level of accrual-earnings management in the firms without enforcement actions has no change before and after the review but their level of real activities manipulation slightly reduces after it. On the other hand, the level of accrual-earnings management significantly increases in the firms with enforcement actions, but there is no significant change in the level of real activities manipulation. The results suggest the idea that audit report review by FSS gives positive influence on the firms without enforcement actions, which means no material violation on auditing or accounting standards, their reporting afterwards. However it causes incentives to even further manipulate earnings after the review for the firms with enforcement actions, which already materially violated those standards. This indicates that audit report review is effective for the firms with no enforcement actions to lead their motivation to continuously improve the quality of their reports. Nevertheless, since the list of firms with enforcement actions are open to the public with the detailed enforcement actions, they are urged to recover their reliability in the market so that they try to make up their target earnings with further earnings manipulation even after they went through enforcement actions by the supervisory authorities. These results imply that more frequent and continuous supervisory system is required for both types of firms in order to expand the monitoring effect of the authorities in the market. Along this, we suggest that the supervisory authorities are urged to increase the number of covering firms subject to audit report reviews, reduce the average terms of the review and keep monitoring the firms having problems in the reliability of their accounting earnings even after the fact of the regular audit report review processes.