Research background: Misleading financial reporting has a negative impact on all stakeholders since financial records are the primary source of information on financial stability, economic activity, and financial health of any company. The handling of them is primarily the responsibility of managers or owners and reasons for doing so may differ. Their common denominator is the artificial creation of information asymmetry to get different types of benefits. It is, therefore, logical that the issue of detecting opportunistic earnings management comes to the fore. Purpose of the article: The purpose of the study is to create a discriminant model of the detection of earnings manipulators in the conditions of the Slovak economy.  Methods: We used the discriminant analysis to create a model to identify fraudulent companies, based on the real data on companies that were convicted from misleading financial reporting in connection with tax fraud in the years 2009–2018. The model is inspired by the Beneish model, which is one of the most applied fraud detection methods at all. Findings & Value added: In order to achieve more accurate detection results, we extended the original model by taking into account the values of indicators from three consecutive years, i.e. by taking into account the development of the potential tendency of companies to be involved in opportunistic earnings management. Our model correctly identified 86.4% of fraudulent companies and overall reaches 84.1% classification ability. Both models were applied on empirical data on 1,900 Slovak companies from the years 2016–2018, while their overlap was 32.7% for fraudulent companies and 38.4% for non-fraud companies. This is a very useful result, as the application of both models rein-forces the results obtained and the identical classification of the company into fraudulent indicates that the manipulation of earnings occurs with a high probability.

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The paper analyses the possibility of applying chosen fraudulent detection technique in the condition of Slovakia and then evaluates its explanatory power. The authors based on the idea that in addition to positive effects of globalization, negative effects on the activity of economic entities are also manifestations of this process. As the society has become more dependent on information technologies, increased globalisation and greater interconnectedness, certain exposure to negatives has expanded right along with them. One of this negative effect is clearly a financial crime of various type, including fraudulent financial reporting. The financial statements should “describe” factually and truthfully the financial and economic health of a company because it is the main sources of information for various type of stakeholders. Handling of it (considering in the context of financial crime) is primary the responsibility of owners or managers (provided the separation of the ownership structure from the management structure). Reasons for doing so are different. Their common denominator is the artificial creation of information asymmetry to obtain different “benefits”. It is therefore logical that the need for constructing techniques that would reveal an unacceptable legal action by a company in a financial reporting process is at the forefront.

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A necessary condition for economic development and raising living standards in Slovakia is to address employment issues in a way that would inter alia contribute to employment sustainability. This important fact mirrors in the study that directly analyses the employability and sustainability of young unemployed jobseekers, participants of the intervention “Graduate Practice”, in the Slovak labour market in 2014–2017 by applying a counterfactual approach. The intervention is one of the active policy measures in the labour market, and its implementation is subject to the specifics of the excluded group of the unemployed. Its aim is to help the members of the group find a job and gain work experience and habits. The impacts of the intervention on the employability and sustainability of young graduates were evaluated based on real data using the caliper-matching technique, the technique of the propensity score-matching method. The intervention database was relatively robust and included 42,626 participants over a 24-month impact period. In the analysis, we considered both the effectiveness and efficiency of the Graduate Practice. The findings point to no or very weak effects of the intervention, especially to the long-term sustainability of jobs. However, its impact on the state budget we consider as positive due to the intervention’s ability to reduce total costs of unemployed graduates. From the methodology point of view, the use of the method is appropriate in finding possible imbalances in the active and passive policies of the labour market. The results of the study themselves have the explanatory power not only for Slovak policymakers but also for policymakers at the level of the European Union. The results are helpful in creating other interventions and setting their conditions for future periods to bring a desired effect on employability and sustainability of members of excluded groups in general.