Does corporate governance affect restatement of financial reporting? Evidence from China

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of corporate governance on financial restatements in China, with a view to providing reference to strengthen the corporate governance and improve the quality of financial information. Design/methodology/approach - The authors investigate associations between financial restatements and corporate governance via a sample of 1,147 listed companies from the period of 2002 to 2006, which includes 880 annual accounting restatements by 465 companies. Logistic model is used to regress restatement dummy variable on not only the equity and board structure, but also the quality of independent auditors. The restatements in this paper are caused by performance‐related accounting errors. Findings - It was found that accounting misstatements related to performance could be prevented or restrained by strong internal governance, such as a board of higher percentage of outside directors and an audit committee that could oversee the accounting and financial reporting process on behalf of all shareholders, and outside governance, such as a big stockholder and a strong outside auditor from the Big4 accounting firms. However, the matched test shows the effect of audit committee on controlling restatements is endogenous, which relies on the effects of other governance factors. Originality/value - In China, studies on the impact of corporate governance on financial restatements are few and the existing empirical researches show the selected samples are small, which constitute small part of the revision of accounting errors. In this paper, the data are more accurate and comprehensive than previous research and matched sample method was used to alleviate the impact of endogeneity of some explanatory variables. So, the conclusions are more reliable than in the past.