Gerenciamento de resultados em cooperativas de crédito no Brasil

Abstract

Credit cooperativism has shown increasing importance in the economic scenario in Brazil, with potential for an increased market share, similar to what already occurs in many developed economies, by playing an important social role through the provision of differentiated financial intermediation services. Credit unions are subject to the regulations of the National Monetary Council and the Central Bank of Brazil, among them the rules on required notional equity, in line with the Basel Accords, which aim to establish the requirement for adequacy of the net equity of the financial institutions to the risks on their assets, operations and negotiations. In this sense, the main focus of this research was checking for the occurrence of earnings management practices to control capital adequacy in cooperatives linked to Sicoob system, during the period between the first quarter of 2001 and the third quarter of 2011. Besides covering earnings management aimed at controlling capital adequacy, which has been dealt with in the literature as capital management, the study aimed to check the occurrence of income smoothing across Sicoob cooperatives, as well as earnings management to avoid reporting losses. In order to assess capital management and income smoothing practices, the methodology adopted was the data panel analysis, with views to identifying the possible discretionary use of provisions for losses in credit operations, which are considered as the main accrual of the financial institutions. In order to assess earnings management practices to avoid reporting losses, a frequency distribution analysis was conducted. The data were provided by the Central Bank of Brazil and the analyses were performed in such a way as to assess all the institutions under study, without the intention and the ability to identify individual behaviors. The results indicate that the studied cooperatives do not manage their earnings towards regulatory capital adequacy, since the variables used as proxy for capital adequacy, among them the Basel index, showed no statistical significance or behavior that evidenced capital management. On the other hand, based on the studied sample, the results provided evidence on the occurrence of income smoothing by Sicoob cooperatives, since the earnings before net expenses with provisions showed a positive and statistically significant indication for explaining changes in the dependent variable net expenses with provisions for losses in credit operations. Finally, a higher frequency of small positive results was found when compared to the frequency of small negative results, which provides evidence on earnings management to avoid reporting losses by the studied institutions.