The Moderating Effects of Corporate Social Responsibility on the Relationship between Creative Accounting Determinants and Financial Reporting Quality

The banking sector is reflected as an essential element in the structure of any economy that leads to the growth of financial capacity for various individuals, organizations, businesses, and countries worldwide. Accounting activities are shown in the financial reports of banks, while the relevant literature has found that creative accounting highly impacts the quality of financial reporting. However, previous studies indicated the limited impacts of creative accounting determinants on the quality of financial reporting, whereas the phenomenon of financial reporting quality is still on the track of generating renewed research interests. The present research investigated the implications of corporate social responsibility on enhancing the impacts of the determinants of creative accounting and the quality of financial reporting in the context of commercial banks. A deductive research approach driven by a survey questionnaire was used as the research methodology to attain the objectives. Accordingly, purposive sampling was used to collect responses from 364 employees of Iraqi commercial banks (with a response rate of 72.8%). The data were analyzed statistically using the SPSS v.25 and AMOS v.24 software. The results show significant impacts of corporate social responsibility in moderating the relationship between the determinants of creative accounting and financial reporting quality of banks towards competitive advantages.