清算企业的盈余管理【外文翻译】

外文文献翻译

原文：

Earnings Management Using Discontinued Operations When making firm-valuation decisions, investors place a higher value on items of income expected to be persistent in the future. Presumably to aid users’ valuation decisions, GAAP generally requires that material nonrecurring items be separately disclosed in the financial statements. However, the separation of net income into recurring and nonrecurring components also gives managers the opportunity to mislead investors, by misclassifying income and expense items. For example, a manager wanting to increase firm valuation can misclassify recurring expenses as nonrecurring, misleading investors as to the persistence of the income increase. In the accounting literature, this type of earnings management is called classification shifting.

McVay _2006_ discusses two reasons why classification shifting can be a relatively low-cost method for managing earnings. First, unlike accrual management or real activity manipulation, there is no “settling-up” in the f uture for past earnings management. If a manager decides to increase earnings using income-increasing accruals, then, at some point, these accruals must reverse. The reversal of these accruals reduces future reported earnings. If a manager decides to increase earnings by managing real activities, such as reducing research and development expenditures, then this likely leads to fewer income-producing projects and reduced earnings in the future. In contrast, classification shifting involves simply reporting recurring expenses in a nonrecurring classification on the income statement, having no implications for future earnings. Second,because classification shifting does not change net income, it is potentially subject to less scrutiny by auditors and regulators than forms of earnings management that change net income.

Discontinued operations represent the income and cash flows of a portion of a company that has been _or will be_ discontinued from the continuing operations of the company. Under SFAS No. 144, the gain or loss for discontinued operations is comprised of three amounts. The first amount is the operating income or loss from the

operations of the component being discontinued for the entire year in which the decision to discontinue is made. The second amount is the gain or loss from disposal, which is the net amount realized over the carrying value of net assets of the component. The third amount is an impairment loss on the “assets held for sale” if the component is not disposed in the same year as the decision to discontinue.5 The results of discontinued operations are reported on the income statement as a separate item _net of tax effects_ after income from continuing operations. The “below the line” reporting of disposals as discontinued operations is likely perceived to be desirable for investors, because it communicates to them the results of a firm’s operations on a “with and without” basis. However, it could be detrimental to investors if managers use their reporting discretion to manage earnings when reporting discontinued operations. For example, managers could allocate normal operating expenses to discontinued operations in order to report increased income from continuing operations. Managers have discretion over the allocation of joint costs between continuing and discontinued operations, and this information is not normally available to external investors. It is doubtful that auditors would detect this manipulation during their analytical review because the company’s financial ratios would be sim ilar to what they were previously.

The ability of asset disposals to be classified as discontinued operations has varied throughout time. Under APB Opinion No. 30 _APB 1973_, only dispositions of business “segments” were able to qualify for reporting as discontinued operations. In general, business segments were defined as a major line of business or a customer class. The FASB believed that investors would benefit from expanded application of the accounting and disclosure rules of discontinued operations and issued SFAS No. 144, Accounting for the Impairment or Disposal of Long-Lived Assets _FASB 2001a_. SFAS No. 144 reduced the threshold for recognition of discontinued operations treatment by introducing the “component of an entity” concept. A component of an entity is distinguishable from the rest of the entity because it has its own clearly defined operations and cash flows. A component of an entity can be a reportable segment, an operating segment _as defined by SFAS No. 131, FASB 1997_, a reporting unit _as defined by SFAS No. 142, FASB 2001b_, a subsidiary, or an asset group. This