이익관리를 위한 비정상재고자산변동액의 활용: 매출액조정액 및 매출원가조정액의 비교

초록

Inventories are accounting items that are likely to be used to manage earnings for theirdiscretionary properties on ending book values. In this regard, prior studies have presentedthat firms had managed their net incomes by changing ending inventories abnormally anddescribed earnings management process using inventories as cost of goods sold managementperspective. However, considering accounting process, inventories can substantially be utilizednot only for cost of goods sold management but sales revenue management. Therefore, this study empirically analyzed the association between abnormal changes of endinginventories and sale revenue management in addition to the association between abnormalchanges of ending inventories and cost of goods sold management in various dimensions. Inparticular, this study investigated whether firms enjoy changing ending amounts of inventoriesmainly for managing sales revenues or managing cost of goods sold. Results of the study are asfollows:(1) Sample firms had managed their sale revenues to be increased by reducing endinginventories abnormally and cost of goods sold to be decreased through ending inventoriesduring verification period. (2) Inventories had practically and mainly used for mounting up sales revenues(upwardmanagement of sales revenues) rather than cost of goods sold. This result may improvelimitation of prior studies which had focused solely on cost of goods sold management perspective in earnings management via abnormal inventory changes. (3) It is found that loss-avoiding suspect firms with earnings slightly greater than or nearlyequal to zero tend to abnormally reduce ending inventories and manage sales revenuesupward rather than other firms. Moreover, it turned out that the bigger firm size, themore tendency to decline ending inventories abnormally and practice upward managementof sales revenues. This implies that there could substantially be fictitious sale revenueson financial statements of those firms. Contribution of this study is that it is the first empirical paper to find out what main purposeof using inventories for earnings management is sales revenue management or cost of salesmanagement. Thus, results of this paper can extend prior studies in terms of firms' actualconduct of earnings management via inventories comprehensively. In particular, results inwhich there is significant tendency to increase sales revenues by reducing inventories abnormallyon condition of loss-expecting or large firm size may support and validate the contribution ofthis paper.

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