O Impacto da Entrada em Vigor das IFRS na Gestão de Resultados: A Experiência Ibérica

Abstract

The EU has determinate that public firms would be obliged to report their financial statements according to IFRS starting from 2005. The adoption of these rules aims at achieving an accounting harmonization and increasing the quality of the financial reports.

Therefore, it would be expected that this transition from national accounting plans to IFRS would lead to a decrease in earnings management practices (discretionary accruals). Nevertheless, prior studies based in voluntary transaction to IFRS have demonstrated mixed evidence on this subject.

This study analyzes the impact of the mandatory transition to IFRS at the earnings management level, based on firms listed in Portugal and Spain. As far as we know, this work is the first to consider the true impact of the transition to IFRS, within a context of obligatory transition. Therefore, it contributes to the literature extension in two ways: i) it analyzes the transition to the IFRS statements in two new countries ii) it is the first that studies transition cases within a mandatory context.

In conclusion, the levels of discretionary accruals (measured in absolute values) in the post IFRS period (2005-2006) are similar to the ones obtained in the pre IFRS period (2002-2004). Nevertheless, the companies that integrate PSI20 or IBEX35 stock indexes show higher levels of discretionary accruals in the post IFRS period. This result expresses the utilization of the statements change to recognize negative situations and does not express any tendency to increase in a discretionary way the accruals absolute value.

It has to be mentioned that no evidence was found that the levels of the discretionary accruals are different between the companies which adopted the fair value criteria and the ones that did not adopted it. The results obtained do not support the hypothesis that the adoption of the fair value criteria can led to an increase in earnings management.