In the national and international contexts of professional accounting, the auditor has played a fundamental role. The professional activity of the independent auditor has both helped to encourage market development and contributed to the establishment of a global socio-economic order.From the point of view of the external users of accounting information and the clients themselves, the professional activity of the auditor is a synonym of trust and credibility. In the last few months, the wave of financial scandals involving large auditing companies, some of which were even convicted for their demonstrated - direct and indirect - intervention in cooking the books, left marks in the professional activity of auditors, and changed the view on these professionals' responsibility for these facts. This article studies and presents the basic concepts related to the phenomenon of earnings management, as well as the factors that induce it, among which we can highlight: ethical and moral values, loopholes or flexible accounting regulations. These factors end up acting as catalyzers of accounting engineering in the design of financial statements and start to serve the interests of those who elaborated them instead of seeking to give a true and fair view of the equity.
earning management; auditor responsibility; ethics