Effects of Corporate Governance on Creative Accounting Practices: Evidence from NSE-listed Companies in India

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of corporate governance on creative accounting practice in Indian NSE-listed public companies. To get insights and analysis of how mitigating effects of governance issues can impact creative accounting practices, a specific set of factors is identified and the multistage technique design is employed to collect samples of 51 companies with 255 firm-year observations for the years 2017–2021. The value of discretionary accrual as estimated using the modified Jones model. The panel data are used for analysis and testing the hypothesis with the help of Stata 15 version statistical software. The results of this study demonstrated that only audit independence has a considerable negative influence on creative accounting practice, indicating that increasing the number of audit independence could reduce unethical accounting manipulation in financial reporting practice. The paper digs further and provides additional details that the board size, return on asset and firm growth significantly appears under a flag of positive creative accounting practices. In contrast, the board’s independence, audit committee, firm size and leverage have no such influence on creative accounting practice. The study also recommends that companies should have an independent audit committee, so as to minimise the accounting irregularities in financial reports.