Despite the above arguments, Astami and Tower (2006) have found evidence suggesting that lower financial leverage is associated with income-increasing accounting techniques. We, however, observe that most of the countries surveyed in their study do not permit the use of IFRSs. In the context of Tanzania, companies rely on bondholders and banks for financing (
DSE Handbook
, 2008). Given the reliance on debt, managers should have incentives to choose income increasing accounting policies to ensure that they abide bythe debt covenants imposed by bondholders and banks and avoid renegotiation costs (Inoue and Thomas, 1996; Beatty and Weber, 2003). We, therefore, hypothesise the following: