This paper investigates the relationship between; (1) corporate social responsibility (CSR) and earnings management (EM) and (2) examine the role of corporate governance (CG) mechanisms in moderating the CSR-EM relation with a special focus on listed firms on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. We estimated the coefficients of the regression models using OLS. The results of the analysis show: (1) a significant positive relation between CRS and earning management. The result highlights the managerial opportunistic use of CSR explained within the agency theoretic framework. In the second analysis we found that when shareholdings by institutional investors is high, the adverse use of CSR by managers is constrain. However, we could not find any evidence that the presence of high concentration of independent directors on a corporate board are able to significantly moderate the CSR-earnings management relation.