Financial Disclosures X-ray and Predictions: Professional Appropriateness to Creative Accounting Practices in Nigeria

This research work focuses on the role played by predictive ratios in effort to check incidence of creative accounting in the financial reporting system of Dangote Cement Nigeria Plc. It examines whether the impact of joint application of the Beneish 8-Predictive Ratios and the Altman Z-Scores as effective check on practices of Creative Accounting in Dangote Cement Nigeria Plc differ significantly. It also makes further effort at determining whether the predictive implications/outcome of the Beneish 8-Predictive Ratios application differ significantly in the pre and post IFRS reporting periods covered in the study. The research work is quantitatively designed. Dangote Cement Plc, the only Nigerian manufacturing company that made the list of Forbes 2015 top 2000 companies in the world, is purposively and judgmentally sampled. Thus, data from secondary sources comprising Annual Reports and Audited Accounts of Dangote Cement Nigeria Plc (2000 – 2015), published journals, Articles, Inaugural lectures etc, are used for the successful completion of this work. Inputs from the Annual Reports and Accounts are further analysed with the aid of Beneish 8-predictive Ratios and Altman Z-Scores ratio using the Mann Whitney U Test, and Wilcoxon statistical techniques. The result of the analyses shows that there is no significant difference in the impact the joint application of Beneish 8-predictive Ratios and the Altman Z-score model would have on investigations into creative accounting practices in predicting possible tendencies of such practices in any corporate organisation in Nigeria. It also found that there is no significant difference in the predictive implications of the Beneish 8-Predictive Ratios in the pre and post IFRS reporting periods of Dangote Cement Company. As a result, the study recommends that professional Accountants must tighten up their audit belt firmly towards ensuring that greater emphasis is equally placed on the data integrity/quality of the financial reports and not just on their IFRS disclosure quality.