【正文】 with the presence of nonexecutive directors on the board. We also find a negative association between earnings management and audit mittees prising a majority of non executives,but no relationship between earnings management and mittees prised solely of nonexecutives. Our results do not support a relationship between earnings management and the use of internal auditor the choice of a Big 5 auditor. Additional testing,using small positive changes in earnings as an indication of earnings management,suggests that audit mittees are associated with this measure of earnings results have important practical implications because of the heightened interest in corporate governance matters from governments,regulators and standard setters. The remainder of the paper is divided into four sections. Section 2 provides the theoretical background for the study and develops the 3 outlines the research method used to test the hypotheses. It also discusses the measurement of earnings management through the estimation of discretionary 4 reports the present study39。Jones,1991。NYSE,2020。Cadbury Committee,1992).These guides suggest that best practice with respect to board position is,at least,a majority of nonexecutive or independent is supported by research evidence such as Beasley(1996),who finds that the presence of independent directors on the board reduces the likelihood of financial statement fraud,and Dechow et al.(1996),who report that firms with a greater proportion of nonexecutive directors are less likely to be subject to Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC)enforcement actions for violating US on these findings,both Peasnell et al.(2020)and Chtourou et al.(2020)predict that board independence is also likely to be associated with a reduction in earnings Peasnell et al.(2020)find empirical support for their prediction with respect to UK firms,Chtourou et al.(2020)fail to find an association between earnings management and board independence for a sample of US these conflicting results,we hypothesize a negative association between board independence and earnings ,we test the following hypothesis: H1(a):Earnings management is negatively associated with the independence of the board of directors. Another important characteristic of boards is whether there is a separation of the roles of the chairperson and the Chief Executive Officer(CEO).While Arthur and Taylor(1993)point out that the underlying economic determinants of separating these roles are not well understood,corporate governance guidelines assume that a board’s ability to perform a monitoring role is weakened when the CEO is also the chairperson of the board( Committee,1992。BRC,1999。Hughes,1999)and to be of sufficient size. Audit mittee activity has been operationalized through the number of mittee meetings held during the financial year,with the expectation that the more often a mittee meets,the more likely it is to carry out its have found that the frequency of audit mittee meetings is negatively associated with both earnings management,as measured by discretionary current accruals(Xie et al.,2020),and the likelihood of enforcement action by the regard to size,several corporate governance reports have proposed that the mittee should consist of at least three members. The existence of an effective audit mittee provides a firm with an added layer of governance,which is expected to constrain earnings management leads to the following hypothesis. H2:Earnings management is negatively associated with the presence of an effective audit mittee. audit function In addition to the audit mittee,firms can voluntarily establish an internal audit function to supplement their existing internal governance established, this function provides firms with an assurance and consulting service,which can improve the effectiveness of their risk management,control,and governance processes(IIA,1999).An internal audit function is also expected to facilitate the operation and effective functioning of the audit mittee,as the goals of the audit function are closely aligned with the financial reporting oversight responsibilities of the audit mittee(Scarbrough et al.,1998。Martin et al.,2020。Francis et al.,1999) [6] . Therefore,we expect that firms that choose a Big 5 auditor are less likely to engage in earnings gives rise to the following hypothesis: H4:Earnings management is negatively associated with the use of a Big 5 auditor. 3 Research design The present study involves a crosssectional analysis of 434 firms listed on the ASX for the financial year ending in test our hypotheses,we use two primary models which regress absolute discretionary accruals on a set of governance and control two models differ only in their measure of audit mittee also conduct additional tests,using alternative measures of both the dependent variable and a number of independent variables. selection Our preliminary sample of 568 firms prised panies for which annual reports were available either on the Connect database,on pany websites or in hard information and information pertaining to boards of directors and audit mittee characteristics were obtained from disclosures made in annua ,annual report disclosure concerning the use of internal audit is not ,this information was obtained by one of three methods. The first method involved consulting the University of Queensland/KPMG Centre for Business Forensics database. The second method involved examining annual report final method involved directly contacting firms,which were either not included on the database or whose annual reports made no mention of an internal audit function. To arrive at the final sample,exclusions were made on the basis of industry classification and insufficient governance or financial the purpose of industry classification,the Global Industry