본 연구는 2009년도부터 2015년까지 구축된 국내 A은행의 데이터 정보를 이용하여 자산규모 10억원 이상 20억원 미만 소규모 제조업종 기업 9,933개에 대한 38,441개 관측치와 고정효과 패널회귀분석 기법을 이용하여 어떠한 항목에 대하여 회계정보 조정을 하며, 이러한 결과가 기업의 단기 성과인 수익성과 생산성에 미치는 영향을 실증적으로 분석한 최초의 연구이다. 본 연구결과를 다음과 같다. 우선, 일반적으로 생각하는 이상으로 소규모 기업의 회계정보 조정 현상은 광범위하며, 그 규모나 빈도가 높다. 또한 ,단순히 이익조정 차원을 떠나 다양한 목적으로 이루어지고 있으며, 최근 경영환경이나 대출환경 등이 어려워지고 있어, 더 빈번해지고 더 과감하게 이루어지고 있었다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 기업의 재무제표 항목들에 대한 회계정보를 왜곡하려는 목적의 조정현상이 기업의 다양한 경영지표 항목과의 관련성을 살펴보았으며, 연구결과를 요약하면 다음과 같다. 첫째, 이익정보 조정은 차입 기업의 수익성에 음(-)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 둘째, 다양한 형태의 회계정보 조정은 수익성에 양(+) 또는 음(-)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 유형자산 조정, 차입금 및 인건비 조정은 수익성에 유의한 양(+)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 반면, 감가상각비 및 차입이자 조정기업의 수익성에는 유의한 음(-)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 셋째, 이익정보 조정은 차입 기업의 노동 생산성에 음(-)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 넷째, 연구 대상이 된 다양한 형태의 회계정보 조정은 유의성이 없는 유형자산 항목 조정만 제외하고, 모두 생산성에 음(-)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 연구결과에 의하면, 소규모 기업에서의 회계정보 조정은 그 항목과 내용에 관계없이 내부 인력의 생산성에 매우 부정적인 영향을 미치고 있음을 시사하고 있다.
The importance of very small companies cannot be overemphasized in that they account for well over 99 percent of total firms and 88% percent of total employment in the Republic of Korea. Recently, due to severe unemployment problems and sluggish economic growth in the economy long-driven by large firms including those conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG, to name a few, the Korean government has focused on supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs, and more recently entrepreneurs with skills, patents and/or business ideas to start up new businesses with more flexible credit guarantees, bank loans amid lower interest rates for investments. While the importance of employment and economic growth is getting more and more emphasized by the government, there still have not been many researches on SMEs and even less on much smaller enterprises. The primary reason of little concern is possibly due to poor quality of information about those non-audited small firms, although accounting practices are more or less governed or monitored by the authorities like tax offices, etc. We in this study particularly investigate the quality of accounting report directly by using financial statement of small firms with total assets in the range of 1 billion and 2 billion Korean won over 7 years from 2009 till 2015 and compare originally prepared financial statements for tax purposes and revised ones after investigations by the lending financial institution afterwards according to the Korean GAAP (generally accepted financial accounting principles). The revision practices are usually unknown to most outsiders and thus have been of little interest by academic researchers. From our analyses, out of 38,441 cases of 9,933 firms during the period, about one third or 33.4% are revised for proper earnings, conversely to say their managed or maybe neglected on purpose or inadvertently reporting in one of the most crucial indicators of performances for investors, employees, tax agents, and the lenders. We also find that the severity of poor reporting aggravates in more recent years in scope and numbers. Based on more rigorous regressions, we find the following empirical results with respect to their profitability in the subsequent accounting year after reporting improperly in financial statements. First, small firms that report earnings poorly report lower return on assets (ROA) than others. Second, those small firms reporting poorly in many different accounts perform worse when they poorly report in depreciation expenses and financial expenses, including interests payments and indirect financing costs. Thirdly, those small firms perform much worse when they are bigger in size, more indebted and longer history in business. In addition, we investigate the effects of poor or distorted accounting reports on the productivity of firms, based on labor productivity, measured by per employee sales amount and find following results. First, those small firms with financial accounting revision history experience a lot worse productivity in labor compared to non-revision firms. Second, unlike the cases of ROAs, the labor productivity measures are worse for the revision small firms, regardless of the causes of revisions due to poor financial reporting in assets, debts, sales or expenses. From the test results, contradictory to those of prior studies, we espouse that report positive relationship between earnings management and profitability or/and productivity, although they do not use various financial accounts as in our study and most of them use the concept of accruals indirectly to measure earnings management.