INCOME SMOOTHING IN COMPANIES LISTED IN LEVELS OF BOVESPA'S CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Abstract

The Income Smoothing have been widely discussed and studied in academic and professional areas, especially due to insecurity caused by recent financial scandals in the capital market, should be understood as a treatment given by managers to the financial reports in order to reduce fluctuations in earnings, disseminating distorted accounting information to external users. The research aimed to analyze the evidences of the income smoothing in companies listed in levels of Bovespa's corporate governance - taking a sample of 90 companies in four levels. Thus it was established in companies the existence of income smoothing in its financial statements, applying a metric of income smoothing on a model supported by analysis of coefficients of variation of profit and sales proposed by Eckel (1981), which was analyzed the behavior of fluctuations in profits and sales companies. Through the study it was possible to analyse the actual existence of smoothing levels of Bovespa's corporate governance, was observed that even in companies that are part of the governance levels, which envisions a possible reduction of asymmetric information between users of financial information, was the practice of income smoothing in the accounting results in about 20% of the sample.