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Abstract

This study investigates the usefulness of deferred tax expense in detecting earnings management in a non-listed firms setting. Specifically, building on the evidence of earnings management Burgstahler and Dichev (1997), this paper investigate the usefulness of deferred tax expense in detecting earnings management to meet two earnings target thresholds (1) to avoid reporting a loss, (2) to avoid reporting an earnings decline. Burgstahler and Dichev (1997) document that firms manage their reported earnings to avoid the losses or the earnings decreases, thus increasing the incidence of producing the small earnings increases and the small positive earnings. Burgstahler and Dichev (1997) classify firms that show small positive earnings (small earnings increases) on the basis whether they avoid losses (earnings decreases) by a narrow margin because such small beaters are suspected of managerial intervention by accrual management or real earnings management. Choi and Kwak (2010) report that suspected non-listed firms that slightly achieve earnings thresholds tend to manage earnings using discretionary accruals as well as real earnings management activities. Meanwhile, prior literature on book-tax differences provides evidence consistent with the differences providing information about earnings quality. For example, Phillips et al. (2003) argue that managers typically have more discretion in financial reporting than in tax reporting and can exploit such discretion to manage income upwards in ways that do not affect current taxable income. Such earnings management will generate temporary book-tax differences that increase a firm’s net deferred tax liability (i.e., defined as the change in deferred tax liabilities less the change in deferred tax assets；DTE) and, consequently, increase its DTE. DTE is a component of a firm’s total income tax expense and reflects the tax effects of temporary differences between book income and taxable income that arise primarily from accruals for revenue and expense items that affect book and taxable income, but in different periods. Detecting earnings management is important in assessing the quality of earnings, and the results of this study should be useful to researchers studying earnings management behavior of non-listed firms and to creditors in their examination of financial reports. Therefore, this study use deferred tax expense (DTE), a publicly available measure, as their empirical surrogate for temporary book-tax differences (Phillips et al. 2003). Following Burgstahler and Dichev (1997), this study use unusually high frequencies of small positive earnings (small earnings increases) in cross-sectional distribution of earnings level (earnings changes) and define as suspected firms whose managers might manage their earning. And this paper use discretionary accruals to measure the extent of firms’ earning management, I employ both the model identified by Dechow et al. (1995) and performance-adjusted discretionary accruals suggested by Kothari et al. (2005) to estimate discretionary accruals. This study observations are based on 12,928 firm-year data, selected from non-listed firms in Korea, for eight years (2000 to 2007). The empirical test results are as follows. In the non-listed firms’ sample tests, I find that significantly positive relation between deferred tax expenses and the suspected non-listed firms reporting small positive earnings and small earnings increases, after controlling for other variables and discretionary accruals that affect the level of DTE. Thus, the results provide evidence consistent with deferred tax expenses generally being incrementally useful with discretionary accruals in detecting earnings management. These results are consistent with the increment usefulness of deferred tax expense in defecting earnings management in a non-listed firms setting. This implies that deferred tax information has the potential to convey relative quality of earnings aside from temporary book-tax differences. This results add to recent findings that indicate a relation between book and tax reporting and firms’ incentives to engage in earnings management activities in a listed firms setting (e.g., Phillips et al. 2003；Choi and Moon 2005；Joo et al. 2005). This paper make a important contributions to the tax accounting literature, and this work contribute to several lines of existing research in earnings management related study. Also, these results add to the literature on the role of financial information for an important and interesting group of non-listed firms. So, I expect the findings in the paper to have useful implications for scholars as well as practitioners, creditors, accounting standard setters, and regulators.