Identify the Strengths and Weaknesses of Discretionary Accruals Models to Identify Earnings Manipulation:

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Identify the strengths and weaknesses of discretionary accruals models to identify earnings manipulation: Financial reporting provides the most available data on the economic performance of listed corporations, therefore they provide critical information not only to ensure the functioning of corporate governance, but also for investors and other shareholders as these rely on such information to determine the performance of the firm and the functioning of managers. Corporate financial reports are usually prepared using accrual account, unless the business in question in very small businesses in which case a less complex cash based accounting system is implemented. The key aspect that distinguishes accrual accounting from cash based accounting is the recognition of events; in fact, accrual accounting recognizes and economic event regardless of when the cash transaction occurs. Thus, economic events are recorded following the matching principle, which recognizes revenues and expenses at the time in which a particular transition occurs rather than when the official payment is made or received. This method has been considered to be more appropriate to suite the complexity of today’s business world because it allows cash flows, whether inwards or outwards, to be combined with an expected future movement of cash thereby providing a more accurate representation of a firm’s financial condition. In other words, accrual accounting is based on the understanding that if an economic transaction takes place the movement of cash that represents that transaction must subsequently follow sometime in the future, therefore accrual accounting effectively disregards the fact that the cash can be received tomorrow or in a year’s time thereby recoding economic transactions as they occur. Today accrual accounting dominates the accounting arena even though it is relatively a complex
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