(DailyBail) – An academic CFO survey finds 20% of US public companies lie on their corporate earnings report while 10% admit their earnings per share are ‘fixed’.

Thanks to ENRON the United States now refuses to prosecute “white collar” financial crimes committed by the likes of Wall Street Banks and public companies traded on the stock exchanges.

Knowing if they get caught, the worse that will happen is a multi-million golden parachute in the form of severance pay and a slap on the wrist fine to regulators for an amount much less than the profits they made from their crimes, accounting fraud has become the norm on Wall Street.

So not only do we have to deal with massively high-speed robots manipulating the markets and government agencies that lie about economic data to boost the poll numbers of the corrupt politicians in office we now face widespread accounting fraud in America.

Ironically, corporate financial news outlets like to run pieces all the time on why it is such a bad idea to invest in China because of such cooking of the books.  Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC… I challenge any one of you to headline this story… but that would be to much to ask because all of the reporters in such organizations are controlled by the same corporations who are committing the fraud and pay off our regulators. Unfortunately, journalistic integrity in corporate owned news outlets is even more of a fantasy than the notion that we can trust Wall Street.

Apparently those stories are nothing more than 1984 style propaganda to boost our sense of nationalism further the concept of American exceptionalism because as the study below show accounting fraud is widespread among US corporation to sucker investors into buying stock.

Of course our regulators are fully aware of such activities, but just as is the case with the $20-$50 trillion being hidden in offshore tax havens, it take very little to put the regulators on your payroll so they look the other way.

From the Social Science Research Network:

Earnings Quality: Evidence from the Field

Abstract:
We provide new insights into earnings quality from a survey of 169 CFOs of public companies and in-depth interviews of 12 CFOs and two standard setters. Our key findings include (i) high-quality earnings are sustainable and are backed by actual cash flows; they also reflect consistent reporting choices over time and avoid long-term estimates; (ii) about 50% of earnings quality is driven by innate factors; (iii) about 20% of firms manage earnings to misrepresent economic performance, and for such firms 10% of EPS is typically managed; (iv) CFOs believe that earnings manipulation is hard to unravel from the outside but suggest a number of red flags to identify managed earnings; and (v) CFOs disagree with the direction the FASB is headed on a number of issues including the sheer number of promulgated rules, the top-down approach to rule making, the curtailed reporting discretion, the de-emphasis of the matching principle, and the over-emphasis on fair value accounting.

 

Number of Pages in PDF File: 74

Keywords: earnings quality, FASB, CFO, survey, earnings management

JEL Classification: M4, G38

Contact Information

Ilia D. Dichev Emory University – Goizueta Business School 1300 Clifton Road Atlanta, GA 30322-2722 United States

John Robert Graham Duke University – Fuqua School of Business Box 90120 Durham, NC 27708-0120 United States 919-660-7857 (Phone) 919-660-8030 (Fax)

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 United States

Campbell R. Harvey Duke University – Fuqua School of Business Box 90120 Durham, NC 27708-0120 United States 919-660-7768 (Phone) 919-660-8030 (Fax)

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 United States

Shivaram Rajgopal (Contact Author) Emory University – Goizueta Business School 1300 Clifton Road Atlanta, GA 30322-2722 United States

Download the full paper (PDF – 74 Pages)

Source: h/t  The Daily Bail

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