Earnings management can be influenced or impacted by any number of factors. The adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Sri Lanka in the year 2012 has provided an opportunity to analyse the impact of these standards on the earnings management practices of firms and companies in the country. In order to study the available literature in this subject area, a search protocol was devised and applied to narrow down the number of works that were relevant. First search terms were created on the basis of the original intent of the article’ study subject. Variations of these terms were applied to the online search engine of ‘Google Search’ in order to produce the widest possible number of results. The produced results were narrowed on the basis of number of filters, including not going beyond page 4 of the search results, and using the Scholarly Works filter of the Google Search engine. Subsequently, results were further narrowed down based on the geographic and contextual relevance. Upon applying this search protocol, four works were identified to be further analysed. The systematic review showed that there was a significant paucity of relevant literature in this area, possibly due to the recent adoption of IFRS in the Sri Lankan companies and firms.

Keywords: IFRS, Earnings Management, Sri Lanka, Accounting