VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL GRADUATION PROJECT FACTORS INFLUENCING THE FINANCIAL RESTATEMENT: EVIDENCE IN VIETNAM Nguyễn Cẩm Vân Hanoi – 2021 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL GRADUATION PROJECT FACTORS INFLUENCING THE FINANCIAL RESTATEMENT: EVIDENCE IN VIETNAM SUPERVISOR: Dr. Nguyễn Thị Kim Oanh STUDENT: Nguyễn Cẩm Vân CODE: 17071340 COHORT: AC2017A MAJOR: Accounting, Analyzing and Auditing Hanoi – 2021 2 ABSTRACT Purposes: The purpose of this study is to look into the factors that influence the financial restatement after-audit of publicly listed companies in Vietnam. It focuses on the size of the company's board of directors, the audited firm, and the total debt to total assets ratio, as well as whether or not the financial restatement has an impact. Design/ Methodology/ Approach: The research is used quantitative method to collect data from annual reports of companies from 2014 to 2020, which is available on HoChiMinh Stock Exchange (HOSE) and Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) and CAFEF websites.
After then, the author approaches the STATA 15.0 tool to analyze the results by Descriptive statistics, Correlation coefficient, and Logistic Regression. Findings: This study adds to the literature on the factors influencing the financial restatement of publicly listed companies after-audit in Vietnam over a 7-year period (2014 to 2020). It was discovered that the total debt to total assets ratio had a significant relationship to the incidence of financial restatement, whereas board size and audit reputation did not appear to affect the incidence of financial restatement. Implication: The research aids in identifying the factors influencing financial restatement in Vietnam, as well as providing useful information for auditors and investors on how to identify inaccurate information on annual reports and make right decisions.
Key words: Financial Restatement, Board size, Audit Reputation and Total debt to total assets. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my instructor, Dr. Nguyễn Thị Kim Oanh of the International School, Vietnam National University for her willingness to support my research for nearly 4 months, as well as her kindness, patience, and her enthusiasm for me. Thanks to her, I got a strong motivation to complete my graduation project on time.
I could have imagined that she would be such a great teacher of Accounting and Auditing majors, providing me with a wealth of knowledge and the orientation of my future career. I also would like to acknowledge my family and friends who supported me during all the time I studied at VNU-IS as well as the period of doing the research and I am gratefully indebted to them. 4 LETTER OF DECLARATION I hereby declare that the Graduation Project titled "Factors Influencing Financial Restatement: Evidence from Vietnam" is the result of my own research and has never been published in any other work. Throughout the implementation process of this project, I took research ethics seriously; all findings of this project are the results of my own research; and all references in this project are clearly cited in accordance with regulations.
I am solely responsible for the accuracy of the numbers, data, and other contents of my graduation project. Hanoi, June 08, 2021 Nguyễn Cẩm Vân 5 TABLE OF CONTENT CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .1 Background of the study .2 Previous studies of financial restatement in around the world and in Vietnam .3 Research objectives and research questions .4 The scale and subject of study .7 Structure of the study .15 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 Definition of Financial Statements .2 Definition of Financial restatements .3 Definition of Earnings Management .3 Fraud Triangle theory .5 Review Literature on Financial Restatement of public listed companies 25 2.6 The factors that influence the financial restatement of public listed companies after-auditing reports in Vietnam.2 Reputation of Audit Firm.3 Debt to Total Assets Ratio .7 Conceptual framework of the study .2 Sample and Data Collection .32 CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH FINDINGS .1 Data Analysis with STATA 15.3 Binary Logistic Regression .3 Binary Logistic Regression .46 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION, CONCLUSION AND LIMITATIONS .1 Discussion and Conclusion: .2 Limitation of the study.3 The Contribution and Implication of the study .55 7 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Fraud Triangle Model .2 The conceptual framework of the study (Source: Author’s analysis) .1 Graphs showing a correlation of -1, 0 and +1 .2 The result of conceptual model .3 The relationship between DEBT and RESTATE .50 8 LIST OF TABLES Table 2.2 Description of variables (Source: Author’s analysis) .1 The measurement of variables .1 Statistics of Restatements.2 Statistic of Industrial sectors .4 Indicators cause financial restatement .5 Correlation Coefficient results .6 Logistic Regression results .7 The result of Odds Ratio .48 9 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In this report, it is indicated that these factors influence financial restatement with evidence from Vietnam. This introduction chapter will have consisted of five sections, namely background of the study (section 1.1), research objectives and research question (section 1.2), research methods (section 1.3), research findings (section 1.4), and structure of study (section 1.1 Background of the study As it can be known, financial statements have been discussed since the early 1980s; however, since the global accounting and auditing crisis and high-profile fraud cases, such as Enron and WorldCom in the United States, research on this subject has become more aggressive. The number of financial restatements published increased from 919 in 1997 to 1390 in 2005 and another 396 restatements occurred from October 2005 to June 2006 (GAO 2002, 2006).
In the US, overstatement of revenue is the most common type of financial restatement (Dechow 2011). In general, the GAO 2004 reported a loss of $100 billion due to accounting restatement from January 1997 to June 2002. Then, during the days following the early announcement of the restatement, an additional 36 USD billion in market capitalisation loss was reported for the period July 2002 to September 2005. Another example in Malaysia, Transmile Group Berhad is the most well-known example of accounting fraud that resulted in a financial restatement.
This fraud scandal caused huge losses for the company, totalling millions of ringgits (Abdullah 2010). In Vietnam, with the secondary data being the fourth-quarter financial report and the post-audit report issued by Viet stock, it was discovered that companies with profit 10 errors account for a relatively large proportion, fluctuating around 74% of the total number of companies listed on the stock market of Vietnam for 5 years (2014-2018). Specifically, this rate is 70%, 75%, 73% 80%, and 72% respectively, for the years from 2014 to 2018. With 297,516 million VND in faults, 2016 was the year with the most.
According to a typical report conducted by the Vietnam Oil and Gas Construction Joint Stock Corporation under the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group, the largest number of errors in 2016 was 65,433 million VND. As a result, the after- auditing profit gap decreased 65,433 million VND compared to the original financial report's 157,156 million VND. The decrease in profit from these consolidated statements was due to a change in the subsidiary’s reports, leading to the revaluation of the consolidated report after the audit, these items such as provision for doubtful debts, unrealized profits, and financial investments of certain member companies of the Corporation, just as to PVX’s explanation report from 2016. (Vietstock 2020) The restatement of financial statements before and after-auditing reports of public listed companies is becoming incredibly common not only in Vietnam but also in other countries, such as the United States, Canada, China, Iran, and Malaysia.
This problem lowers the accuracy of financial reports, leading to users being misled when making investment decisions, which has a significant impact on the stock market’s resource allocation performance. Additionally, firms that restated their financial statements suffered significant market value losses (Karpoff 2008, Palmrose 2004), increases in the cost of capital (Hribar 2004), and high executive turnover (Hennes 2008, Srinivasan 2005) because of a given firms previously released low-quality financial information, restatements call the credibility of future financial reports into question.2 Previous studies of financial restatement in around the world and in Vietnam Many studies on restatement of financial statements have been conducted in many countries, and some studies have discovered a number of factors that affect the restatement of financial statements (including fraud and errors), such as: the influence of some corporate board characteristics (Beasley 1996, Lobo 2013, Srinivasan 2005) or due to the characteristics of audit quality of listed companies ((Francis 2013, Kenney 2004, Lobo 2013), ownership factors (Khanna 2000, Shleifer 1997), and other characteristics. However, in Vietnam, in previous studies, the manifestation of financial restatement in certain public listed companies or the restated part in annual reports were the only findings. Recently, it examined another aspect as these factors periodically impacting the financial restatement of public listed companies in Vietnam’s stock market (Trần Thị Giang Tân & Trương Thùy Dương 2016) or (Hương 2018) or (Minh An, 2015),and (Mỹ Hà và Công Lý 2014)).
It is essential to determine what factors affect the financial restatements in Vietnam in the period from 2014 to 2020. Hence, this project will evaluate “The factors influencing financial restatement of public listed companies after auditing in Vietnam from 2014 to 2020.3 Research objectives and research questions Overall, this project aims to identify the factors that influence the financial restatement of public listed companies, especially compared before to after-auditing reports in Vietnam during the period from 2014 to 2020. The aim of this research is as follow: • To identify the factors that affect financial restatement in Vietnam. 12 • To identify relationships between those identified factors with financial restatement in Vietnam.
Two research questions were developed based on the objectives: 1. What factors do affect financial restatement in Vietnam? 2. To what extent those factors affect financial restatement in Vietnam? 1.4 The scale and subject of study 1.1 The study’s subject The research focuses on the appearance of financial restatements after auditing reports and these factors that influence financial restatements after auditing of publicly listed companies in Vietnam’s stock market, such as HoChiMinh stock exchange (HOSE), Hanoi stock exchange (HNX), and CAFEF.2 The study’s scale It will be collected by public listed companies in HOSE and HNX and CAFEF. Companies engaged in finance and related financial institutions, such as a bank, trusts, closed-end funds, exchange-traded funds, and insurance companies, may be excluded from the collection, as they are subject to various laws and regulations relating to the finance industry (Abdullah et al.2010; Dechow et al.
The selected public listed companies consisted of companies from these sectors: property, construction, trading and service, consumer products, hotels, technology, industrial products. In addition, from 2014 to 2020, the annual reports of these companies were downloaded to evaluate the financial and non-financial aspects of the restatement of financial statements.5 Research methods In this study, the methods are to collect the financial information (debt to total assets) and non-financial information (board size and audit reputation) in each annual report. In addition, the annual reports obtained for the period from 2014 and 2020 can be concluded (7 years). The report examined the profit-before-tax indicator, the number of board members, the debt-to-all assets percentage, and audit reputation.0 is a useful tool for analyzing the results of the after-audit of Vietnam's 142 public listed companies as a result of these factors affecting their financial restatement.
Descriptive analysis (calculated the percentage of companies that restated their financial reports for 7 years), the correlation coefficient of Pearson, and logistic regression are statistical characteristics to determine results.6 Research findings This study provides literature on the factors impacting Vietnam's after-audit financial restatement reports from 2014-2020 of publicly listed companies. In particular, the research found that the majority of the financial report reaffirmed was due to the debt- to-total-assets ratio, while the remaining factors (board size and audit reputation) appear not to affect company financial restatement.7 Structure of the study The research project is broken down into five parts. Firstly, the background of the study, research objectives and research questions, research methodology, research findings, and the structure of the study are all covered in Chapter 1.