The relevance of preparing quality financial statement reveals the need to rely on corporate governance mechanism, which can warn against earnings management. Global corporate scandals that took its toll with the collapse of once prestigious companies around the globe has increased the clamoring for a better governance mechanism worldwide and captivated the concern of academia to empirically establish any association between corporate governance and the earnings management among non-financial companies in Nigeria. It is against this backdrop this study specifically evaluated the influence of board size, board independence, board activity, board diversity and audit committee independence and expertise on real earnings management. The study sample 46 non-financial listed companies from 82 listed companies between the period of 2018 to 2021 and the result from panel corrected standard error regression analyses revealed a relationship between real earnings management and independent variables (board size, board independence, diversity, and audit committee expertise) with 0.006065, -0.27174, -0.03364 and 0.137426 as coefficient, and 0.027, 0.000, 0.000, and 0.000 as p-value respectively. Thus, in accordance with the findings, it can be concluded that collective corporate governance mechanism and real earnings management are related. Based on the above conclusion, it was recommended that firms should encourage larger board members with independence and sensitivity to constrain manipulation annual reports. Finally, companies should persist in expanding audit committee expertise and independence in order to promote effectiveness of the committee which, thus, increases the quality of financial reporting.
Keywords: Corporate Governance, Financial Statement, accounting earnings, earning management, non-financial companies
