This study investigates whether private firms in the United States engage in earnings management. Prior literature shows that public firms pursue earnings management for opportunistic reasons, including to influence analysts' and markets' perceptions of the value of the firm, to reduce the cost of debt and equity issuances, and to reduce the potential for debt covenant violations, among others. Private firms in the United States are not obligated by law to publish their financial statements as they do not come under the purview of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which requires publicly held companies to file periodic financial statements accessible to their shareholders and the market at large. If private firms are not mandated to publish their financial statements, what would motivate them to manage their earnings? As outlined in this study, though private firms are not accountable to outside shareholders, they interact with other stakeholders, including providers of debt and trade credit and customers whose perception of the firm can be affected by earnings management. In addition, this study tests for the presence of earnings management in private firms in general. A special emphasis is placed on the role that leverage plays in motivating earnings management in private firms. The study results document that private firms do engage in earnings management. In addition, the results show that as private firm size increases, earnings management decreases. The results also indicated that the presence of leverage does stimulate earning management in private firms in the United States, but private firms do not employ earnings management strategies prior to raising debt. Other studies find that earnings management through accruals declined significantly after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Thus, my study also looks at the trend in earnings management over time for private firms, and the results show that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act did not impact private firms' earnings management strategies. The study is conducted using discretionary accruals, measured by the cross-sectional version of the Jones (1991) Model, to estimate earnings management. Other models for estimating discretionary accruals are considered for robustness. The research contributes to the literature by providing insight into whether established evidence on earnings management in public companies extends to private firms.