Prior research suggests there are incentives for firms to manage earnings in order to
avoid missing earnings forecasts (Kasznik and McNichols 2002), smooth earnings (Barth
et al. 1999), and avoid losses (Brown 2001), and that these incentives intensified contemporaneously
with the wave of ERP system adoptions in the mid to late 1990s (Cerullo and
Cerullo 2000; Berenson 2003).1 Graham et al. (2006), in a survey of 401 senior financial
executives and additional in-depth interviews, find that the presence of earnings management
in response to market incentives is pervasive and accruals are seen as a method of
meeting earnings benchmarks. One CFO in the Graham et al. (2006) study stated, ‘‘You
have to start with the premise that every company manages earnings’’ (Graham et al. 2006,
30).