Following Beasley (1996), Dechow et al. (1996) intend to test the relationship
between earnings management and companies’ internal governance structures. The study
selects 92 companies that violated US GAAP between 1982 and 1992, and compares
discretionary accruals (measured by Jones model) with 92 non-fraud companies. First,
they find that the major incentive of earnings manipulation is to lower the cost of external
financing. Second, the principal reason for managers’ earnings management is the weak
corporate governance mechanism. Third, the independence of board of directors and audit
committee significantly dissuade earnings management. Dechow et al. (1996) study
earnings management through the contrastive analysis of fraud and non-fraud companies.
However, their findings cannot be applied universally for the companies that have low
level of external financing due to the extremely limited sample selected in their studies.
4.1.3 Becker, DeFond, Jiambalvo and Subramanyam (1998)