Financial Information Manipulation and Its Effects on Investor Demands: The Case of BIST Bank

Financial manipulation means the modification made knowingly and willfully by businesses in accounting records and transactions, in financial statements, through addition and subtraction, for the purpose of misleading financial information users. Financial manipulations are expected to have an effect on the decisions of financial information users. The present study was established on the basis of two main objectives. The first objective is to determine whether banks, which are Public Interest Entities (PIE), manipulate their financial statements. As for the second objective, it is to reveal whether the detected financial manipulations have an effect on investor decisions. The research conducted to achieve the first objective is based on the examination of independent audit reports for the periods between 2009 and 2017, pertaining to 45 banks registered to the Banks Association of Turkey, in terms of presented opinions. Data acquired from examined reports were subjected to content analysis via the Microsoft Excel program. In line with the second objective of the study, investor numbers for the periods between 2010 and 2017, of 13 banks, which are within the scope of BIST BANK, were included in the analysis, according to data acquired from the Central Registry Agency. Financial statements of banks, with audit reports in which a qualified opinion is expressed, were considered to have been manipulated. SPSS 22.0 statistics pack software was used to analyze whether investment demands toward these banks had an effect on decisions of domestic and foreign investors. In the analysis, frequency and One-Way ANOVA tests were used. In consequence of the analyses conducted, it was determined that, around one fifth of financial statements of PIE banks, pertaining to the periods between 2009 and 2017, were manipulated; it was mostly committed by private banks, and majority of the manipulations were committed due to free provisions made. It was also observed that manipulations did not have an effect on decisions of neither domestic nor foreign investors. The reason behind the latter is the fact that while the level of manipulations in financial statements is significant, it is not a widespread occurrence.