The problem in accounting conservatism practice has been the focus of everyone. In our view, it was attributed amongst other factors to the weak of corporate governance practices. Such study develops an empirical model on the association between some mechanisms of corporate governance and accounting conservatism in terms of foreign ownership, board independence, board size and audit committee, through choosing Jordanian listed companies as research sample. The data were collected through using the annual reports of 113 Jordanian companies for year 2011. Four hypotheses were developed in this study. Upon using the multiple regression analysis, three of them were significant while one was not. This study concludes that there is a positive and significant association between each of foreign ownership, board independence and audit committee and accounting conservatism. While a negative and insignificant relationship between board size and conservatism. In addition, this study opens up opportunities and provides avenues for more in-depth research related to the accounting conservatism.

The purpose of the current study is to examine the influence of ownership structure and board members' skills in the practice of accounting conservatism of Jordanian listed firms. The data were obtained from the annual reports of 116 Jordanian listed firms for year 2011. By using the multiple regression analysis, the results show that the influence of corporate ownership structure and board skills on accounting conservatism were somewhat varied. All variables were a positive relationship with the conservatism with the exception of the board multiple ISSN 2162-3082 2014 www.macrothink.org/ijafr 178 directorship which has negative relationship with conservatism. Five hypotheses were developed and offered in this paper, institutional ownership and board financial expertise were supported, while family ownership, board tenure and board multiple directorships were not supported due to the higher level of P-value compared to 0.05. These results refer that corporate governance plays a vital role in enhancing the level of conservatism and reducing the agency conflict. Further, regulators bodies in Jordan should increase the effectiveness role of corporate governance in Jordanian companies in order to enhance the quality of financial reports. In addition, this study opens up avenues for more studies on accounting conservatism not only in Jordan, but also in other countries where this area of study is lacking. International Journal of Accounting and Financial Reporting