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  • 2018
  • Article
  • European Accounting Review

The Role of Overbilling in Hospitals' Earnings Management Decisions

By: Jonas Heese
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Abstract

This paper examines the role of overbilling in hospitals’ earnings management choices. Overbilling by hospitals is a form of revenue manipulation that involves misclassifying a patient into a diagnosis-related group that yields higher reimbursement. As overbilling allows hospitals to increase revenues without altering operations, affecting costs, or having to reverse such behavior in the future, I propose and find that overbilling reduces hospitals’ use of managing accruals or cutting discretionary expenditures. Next, I find that hospital managers prefer overbilling to managing accruals (cutting discretionary expenditures) when cutting discretionary expenditures (managing accruals) is constrained and vice versa. Collectively, my findings suggest that overbilling is an important alternative manipulation tool in hospitals.

Keywords

Overbilling; Accrual-based Earnings Management; Real Activities Manipulation; For-profit Hospitals; Earnings Management; Health Industry

Citation

Heese, Jonas. "The Role of Overbilling in Hospitals' Earnings Management Decisions." European Accounting Review 27, no. 5 (2018).
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About The Author

Jonas Heese

Accounting and Management
→More Publications

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More from the Author
  • Accounting Outages at Plug Power? (C) By: Jonas Heese, Joseph Pacelli and James Barnett
  • When Executives Pledge Integrity: The Effect of the Accountant's Oath on Firms' Financial Reporting By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Caspar David Peter
  • Accounting for Loan Losses at JPMorgan Chase: Predicting Credit Costs By: Jonas Heese and Jung Koo Kang
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