Title: Financial reporting quality of private and public banks in India

Authors: Vijyapu Prasanna Kumar; Sujata Kar

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, Uttarakhand, India ' Department of Management Studies, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, Uttarakhand, India

Abstract: The present study compares the earnings management practices amongst the Indian private and public sector banks using the second digit test, one of the primary Benford law tests. The sample consists of data on five variables: interest income, other income, interest expenses, deposits, and loans and advances from 14 private and 17 public sector banks for Q1 2005-Q4 2018. Deposit turns out to be the most misreported financial figure for the private banks while public sector banks misrepresented loans and advances the most. Overall, the public sector banks seem to be more into rounding up behaviour as compared to the private banks. We also explored possible linkages between financial manipulations and a CEO's tenure approaching its completion and observed evidence in support of this argument.

Keywords: rounding up behaviour; Benford's law; earnings management; second digit test; mean absolute deviation; MAD; India.

DOI: 10.1504/AAJFA.2022.127924

Afro-Asian Journal of Finance and Accounting, 2022 Vol.12 No.6, pp.712 - 729

Received: 10 Jun 2020
Accepted: 30 Apr 2021
Published online: 22 Dec 2022 *

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