【正文】 is: 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。Standards Australia International,2020).The appointment of the CEO to the position of chair can lead to a concentration of power(Beasley,1996)and possible conflicts of interest,resulting in a reduction in the level of leads to the following hypothesis: H1(b):Earnings management is negatively associated with the separation of the roles of CEO and board chair. mittee In order to more efficiently perform their duties,boards of directors might delegate responsibilities to board relation to monitoring the financial discretion of management,it is the audit mittee that is likely to provide shareholders with the greatest protection in maintaining the credibility of a firm’s financial is because of the specialized monitoring of financial reporting and audit activities provided by the audit mittee. In Australia,the Government’s Corporate Law Economic Reform Program(Audit Reform and Corporate Disclosure)Act 2020(CLERP 9)(Commonwealth of Australia,2020)proposes mandatory audit mittees for the Top 500 listed ,the Australian Stock Exchange(ASX)amended its listing rules in 2020 to require any pany that was included in the Standard and Poor’s 500/ASX .All Ordinaries Index at the beginning of its financial year to have an audit mittee during that addition,in March 2020,the ASX Corporate Governance Council released a best practice guide that remends that all panies have an audit mittee(ASX,2020).However,in the year 2020,there was no requirement mandating audit only rule in place was that listed pany with no audit mittee should disclose the reasons for this in a corporate governance statement in the pany’s annual report. Prior published literature indicates that the effectiveness of an audit mittee is dependent,in part,on the extent to which the mittee is independent,its frequency of meetings and its size. It is contended that audit mittees are unable to function effectively when members are also executives of the firm(Lynn,1996。BRC,1999。McMullenandRaghundan,1996。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。Goodwin,2020).The formation of an internal audit function is endorsed by governance reports(NYSE,2020)and prior literature(Collier,1993。Martin et al.,2020。Clikeman,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