Abstract:
The research aims to examine the association between the qualifications of the executive board; the executive board independence and the number of executive board members, the external auditors' qualitfication that are consist of : the auditor's quality and the types of audit opinion, capital structure, and discretionary accruals. The samples are selected from listed companies in all sectors, except Finance and Securities, Banking, and Rebabilitation Companies, in the Stock Exchange of Thailand from 1999 to 2004. The discretionary accruals are calculated by applying the Healy (1985) Aggregate Accregate Accruals Model. The multiple regression model is used in the analysis at statistically significant level 0.05The findings show that the auditor's quality, the type of audit opinions and the capital structure, the representative of financial risk, are positively significantly associated with the discretionary accruals while the executive board independence and the number of the executive board members are not significantly related to the discretionary accruals. The results indicate that the auditor's quality, the type of audit opinions and firms' capital structure can be utilized in investigating the earnings management behavior.