Dundee Business School Dundee, Scotland

This study explores whether respondent firms to the IASC’s extractive industries issues paper (issued for comment in November 2000) possess characteristics likely to induce managerial intent to smooth income and if these possibly influenced the pattern of their responses. Buckmaster (2001, 12) includes under the “regulatory smoothing ” heading of taxonomy of smoothing tactics “any literature applicable to income smoothing and accounting regulation whether it be lobbying effort, recognition of lobbying effort, provisions in regulations that were written in order to reduce income volatility, or prohibitions of smoothing tactics. ” The present study relates to this classification. A revisit of the role of lobbying in the standard-setting process is of relevance in the on-going efforts aimed at producing a substantive accounting standard for the extractive industries and the global harmonization of accounting standards. This study seeks to establish whether comment letters have information content that will provide unique exposition of managerial intent to smoot