The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of the external auditor and the external accountant on the level of discretionary accruals of small- and medium-sized Belgian enterprises that are not legally obliged to appoint an external auditor and an external accountant. There exist evidence on the positive impact of auditors on the quality of financial statements of the SMEs. However, to our knowledge, few investigate the impact of the external accountant on the quality of the financial statements. This matter is a key component to evaluate the complementarity of the work of the auditor and the accountant in the SMEs. Indeed, the external auditors sometimes represent a serious financial burden to the SMEs, leading the managers to replace the external audit function by the external accounting function. We argue that the external auditor and the external accountant are complementary and that sole the external accountant cannot replace the external auditor when it comes to assure the quality of financial statements. Our analyses are based on hand-collected data of 136 small- and medium-sized Belgian enterprises in 2011 and 2012. In Belgium, all the companies must report their financial statements on an annual basis. The database constituted with these pieces of information is an opportunity to examine financial accounting information of small- and medium-sized enterprises that are not legally obliged to appoint an external auditor and an external accountant. We use the approach of earnings accruals models to empirically analyze earnings management in small- and medium-sized Belgian enterprises. We apply a cross-sectional regression analysis as in Hribar and Collins (2002), Bartov, Gul, and Tsui (2000), Becker et al. (1998), DeFond and Jiambalvo (1994) and Teoh, Welch, and Wong (1998a); (1998b) in order to evaluate the level of discretionary accruals and the impact of the external auditor and the external accountant on that level. The results of our quantitative analysis support our first ...