THE EFFECT OF INFORMATION ASYMMETRY ON PROFIT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN FOOD AND BEVERAGE COMPANIES LISTED ON THE INDONESIA STOCK EXCHANGE

Management as managing the company's business often feels burdened with pressures to meet short-term performance targets, such as revenue or profit growth, and the fulfillment of other performance indicators. These pressures ultimately force management to carry out earnings management in the financial reporting process. The purpose of this study is to examine and analyze the effect of information asymmetry on profit management practices in food and beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. The population in this study is all Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, while samples that meet the criteria for sampling observations carried out for three years, namely from 2017-2019 and as many as 22 Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. Data collection techniques in this study used documentation techniques. While the data analysis technique used is a simple linear regression analysis consisting of hypothesis testing and coefficient of determination. The results of this study show that the independent variable, namely information asymmetry, has a significant effect on profit management in Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. This means that the better the information asymmetry in food and berevage companies, the better the profit management practices of 22 food and berevage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.


INTRODUCTION
Many things are needed by external parties of the company such as creditors, investors, and others in making decisions to invest their shares (investment) or lend funds to an entity.One of them is to understand the financial statements of investment object companies.Financial statements are the results of operational activities carried out by the company to produce information that will later be useful for decision making.Information in financial statements can help owners or other parties such as investors and creditors to assess the company's strength in generating profits in the future.
Financial statements are a form of management accountability to the principal (investors, fund owners), to report results or performance that has been carried out throughout the period.Management as a party that has been given full authority and trust by the principal to manage the company's business often feels burdened with pressures to meet short-term performance targets, such as revenue or profit growth, and meet other performance indicators.These pressures ultimately force management to carry out earnings management in its financial reporting process.
Profit management arises as a result of agency problems, namely the lack of interest between owners and management.Profit management problems are agency problems that are often triggered by the separation of roles or differences in interests of owners (shareholders) with company managers (management).Furthermore, management as a company manager has information about the company faster, more, and more valid than shareholders (information asymmetry) so that it allows management to carry out accounting practices oriented to profit figures, which can create certain impressions or achievements.Therefore, as a manager, managers are obliged to provide signals regarding the condition of the company to the owner, the signals provided can be done through the disclosure of accounting information such as financial statements.However, the information submitted is sometimes received not in accordance with the actual company conditions.This condition is known as asymmetrical information or information asymmetry.
Information asymmetry occurs because managers are superior in mastering information to other parties (owners or shareholders).Assuming that individuals act to maximize their own interests, the information asymmetry they have encourages agents to hide some information that the principal does not know as the owner.So that the asymmetry between management (agent) and owner (principal) provides an opportunity for managers to carry out profit management (aernings management) in order to increase their utility.Management's flexibility to manage profits can be reduced by providing higher quality information to these outsiders.The quality of financial statements will reflect the level of profit management.Some studies have found that information asymmetry can affect profit management such as research conducted by [1] [2].Agency theory implies an information asymmetry between managers as agents and owners (in this case shareholders) as principals.Information asymmetry arises when managers know more about the company's internal information and prospects in the future than with shareholders and other stakeholders.Associated with an increase in company value, when there is an information asymmetry, managers can provide signals about the company's condition to investors in order to maximize the value of the company's shares.Signals that provide can be done through disclosure (disclosure) of accounting information.
Schift and Lewin in [3] state that agents (management) are in positions that have more information about their capacity, work environment and the company as a whole than principals (company owners).Assuming that individuals are acting to maximize their own self-interest, the information asymmetry they have encourages the agent to hide some information that the principal does not know so that in such conditions the principal is often at a disadvantage.

Independent Variables
In this study information asymmetry is an independent variable.Information asymmetry arises when managers are more aware of the company's internal information and future prospects than shareholders and other stakeholders.Information asymmetry is measured using relative bidaskspread [5] which operates as follows: Where: 1. SPREAD: The difference between the ask price and the bid price of company i that occurs on day t for 1 year 2. Askit: the highest ask price of company i stock that occurs on day t 3. Bidit: the lowest bid price of company i stock that occurs on day t.

Dependent Variables
The dependent variable in the study is profit management measured using proxy discretionary accruals calculated using the modified Jones model.The stages in calculating discretionary accruals are as follows: 1.The first step is to find total accruals (TACit) by subtracting net income from cash flows from operating activities for a period.
2. The second step is to calculate non-discretionary accruals (NDAits).
3. Next can be calculated the value of discretionary accruals.
experiments and observations [6] Testing of hypotheses in this study uses Statistical packages for social science (SPSS) tools, namely with simple linear regression analysis consisting of: 1. Partial Regression Test (T Test) The statistical test T basically shows how far the influence of an independent variable is individually in explaining the dependent variable [6].The T test was performed using a significance level of 0.05 (α=5%).

Coefficient of Determination Analysis (Adjusted R2)
The coefficient of determination (R2) aims to measure the ability of the model in stocks to explain the variation of dependent variables with values between zero and one.The value R2 = 0 means that the independent variable does not have the ability to run variations of the dependent variable and the value R2 = 1 means that the free variable has the ability to explain variations in the dependent variable.

Descriptive Research Variable Data
In this study, research variables are classified into two groups, namely independent variables and dependent variables.The independent variable in this study is information asymmetry, while the bound variable is profit management.
The research object used in this study is a Food and Beverage company listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) during the 2017-2019 period.This study was conducted to determine whether information asymmetry has a significant effect on profit management.
The total population of all Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) for the 2017-2019 period is 34 companies.However, the sample used in this study was 22 companies.The following is the financial statement data of Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during the 2017-2019 period related to this study, including:

Information Asymmetry
One of the obstacles that will arise between managers (agents) and company owners (principal) is the presence of information asymmetry.Information asymmetry is a state Where the agent has more information with the principal, this condition Provide opportunities for agents to use the information they know to manipulate financial reporting in an effort to maximize their prosperity.This information asymmetry results in moral hazard in the form of management efforts to carry out management (Rahmawati) in [7].
The following is information asymmetry data on Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.provides many opportunities for managers to perform profit management actions.
According to [8] states that information asymmetry is private information that is only owned by informed investors.Information asymmetry can occur in the capital market when one capital market participant has more information than other market participants.
The amount of information asymmetry that occurs in a traded can be measured using the bid ask spread.

Profit Management
Profit management is the manager's choice of accounting policies to achieve specific goals [5] Profit management is used to make good financial statements because of the existence of good finances, of course, investors are interested in buying shares in the company because it is considered to have good performance.
Profit management is done deliberately, within the limits of aiming at a desired level of profit.It is the manager's action to increase (decrease) the current reported profit of the unit for which the manager is responsible, without increasing (decreasing) the longterm economic profitability of the unit.
The following is profit management data for Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.Source: Data processed Based on table 5 above, it can be seen that profit management in Food and Beverage companies is Low.With a negative average discretionary accrual value shows that there is a reduction in discretionary accrual which is a decrease in profits.According to [9] profit management will result in a better performance of the company by generating high net profit.Profit management is the manager's choice of accounting policies to achieve specific goals.Profit management is used to make good financial statements.The existence of good finances, of course, investors are interested in buying shares of the company because it is considered to have good performance [5].

Partial Regression Test (T Test)
The t test is used to test or partially measure the presence or absence of the influence of the information asymmetry variable (X) on the profit management variable (Y) the results of the t test show that the independent variable against the dependent variable is used Tcalculate < table and sig>α (0.05), then the information asymmetry variable variable has no effect.Meanwhile, if Tcalculate > Ttable, the independent variable has a significant effect on the dependent variable.The results of the t test in this study can be seen in table 7. Based on the table above, it can be seen that the value of the R square is 0.108 which means 1.08% and this states that the information asymmetry variable is 1.08% to affect the profit variable.Furthermore, the difference is 100% -1.08% = 98.2%.Influenced by other variables that were not studied in this study.

Discussion
Based on the results of the above study, it shows that partial information asymmetry has a significant effect on profit management.this shows that information asymmetry can improve profit management in Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.The magnitude of the influence of information asymmetry on profit management in this study is very minimal.Where the amount of information owned by the company is not the same as the amount of information owned by parties outside the company.Companies must be transparent in disclosing all company information.The higher the information asymmetry in the company will affect profit management practices.In asymmetry it is stated that if both parties (agent and principal) are people who strive to maximize their utility, then there is good reason to believe that agents will not always act to maximize principal profits.
The principal can limit the agent's behavior by setting incentives / bonuses that are in accordance with the agent's performance and supervising to minimize deviant agent behavior.[8] states that information asymmetry is private information that belongs to informed investors only.Information Asymmetry can occur in the capital market when one capital market participant has more information than other market participants.The amount of information asymmetry that occurs in a traded stock can be measured using the bid ask spread.And profit management is one of the factors that can reduce the credibility of financial statements, and add bias in financial statements and interfere with financial statement users who believe the engineered profit figures as unengineered profit figures.Profit management is an effort by managers to influence information in financial statements with the aim of tricking stakeholders who want to know the performance and condition of the company.
The results of this study are in line with the results of previous research conducted by [1][2] concluded that information asymmetry simultaneously affects profit management.However, other studies have found that information asymmetry has no significant effect on profit management [7].

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Based on the data obtained as well as data analysis that has been carried out as well as discussions that have been carried out in the previous chapter and research conducted from the results of hypothesis testing using simple regression analysis, it can be concluded that it partially has a significant effect on information asymmetry on profit management in Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.
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Equilibrium Volume 13. No. 1. Tahun 2024 eISSN 2684-9313 Hal 227-239 pISSN 2088-7485Table 4 . Information asymmetry data on food and beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.
Based on table 4 above, it can be seen that the information asymmetry in Food and Beverage companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange is increasing and decreasing and fluctuating.Food and Beverage companies have such a large information asymmetry condition compared to profit management and such a high information asymmetry