Les Entreprises Implantées au Cameroun Manipulent-ils Leurs Résultats Pour Eviter de Publier les Petites Pertes ?

Abstract

The objective of this article is to determine if companies located in Cameroon manipulate their earnings to avoid publishing low losses. Based on a sample of 1,525 companies observed over a three-year period and using statistical tools such as normality histograms and statistical tests, we arrive at the results below. First, we note that there is indeed a discontinuity in the distribution of corporate earnings at the threshold of zero. This discontinuity allows us to identify suspicious companies which represent more than 67% of the companies studied. Also by comparing the number of suspicious businesses located to the right of the threshold to the number of suspicious businesses located to the left of the threshold, we find that there are more suspicious enterprises to the right of the zero earnings threshold. However, unlike studies carried out in European and American contexts, the proportion of suspicious companies located to the left of the threshold is relatively large. We then deepened our research to try to identify among the suspicious companies those which can be qualified as manipulative. This deepening was done through an analysis of the evolution over three years of the earnings of suspicious companies knowing that manipulation refers to the transfer over time of charges and products to obtain short terms changes in the transfer of wealth. This analysis allowed us to obtain, among the suspicious companies, a handling rate of more than 58%.

Keywords: earnings management, accounting thresholds, zero result, suspicious companies, manipulative companies.

DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/11-2-06

Publication date: January 31^st 2020