Abstract:
The objective of this research is to compare earning management before and after establishing audit committee of listed company in the Stock Exchange of Thailand. Data was collected from financial statement of all sectors exclueding Finance and Securities, Banking, Insurance sector. Data was separated into two groups, year 1995-1998 and 1999-2002, to represent accruals before and after establishing audit committee, respectively.The research used the discretionary accruals as the proxy for earning management. They analysis focus on comparing absolute mean of discretionary accruals at significant level 0.05. The discretionary accruals were the difference of the changes in total accruals and non-discretionary accruals, which was estimated from cross sectional regression analysis Jones' 1991 model.The result shows that mean absolute of discretionary accruals after establishing audit committee is less than those before establishing audit committee. However, the mean statistics are not significant. This may be concluded that establishing audit communittee has no impact on earning management by discretionary accruals.