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The purpose of this study is to examine whether auditor's unqualified opinion on internal control (ARIC) is a powerful proxy for the effectiveness of internal control in Chinese context. A rich body of research conducts their designs on an assumption that companies have more effectiveness of internal controls if they disclose ARICs. This study argues that the ARICs are not always reliable, because audit market is well characterized by excessive competition and market supervision is poorer in China compared to developed countries.

The study uses 2008 and 2009 years Chinese listed‐firms data and the Tobit regression to test the relationship between ARIC and accrual quality. The paper employs the Heckman model for self‐selection bias, which are possibly introduced by choice in disclosing ARICs.

The paper finds that firms disclose ARICs do not report lower abnormal accruals relative the non‐ARIC firms, and firms with ARICs issued by dominant auditors show more reliable accruals relative to non‐ARIC firms and firms that disclose ARICs but fail to be issued by dominant auditors. The results are robust to additional accrual quality measure, additional audit quality measure, and the correction of self‐selection bias by using the inverse Millo ratio approach.

The results suggest that implementing Chinese‐SOX could be facilitated by improving audit quality.

Professional accounting associations in various countries and governmental and other quasi‐official bodies have played an important role not only in the evolution of internal control reporting on a global scale, but also in educating management, investors, financial institutions, accountants, auditors, and other interested parties highlighting the pervasiveness of the effects of a sound internal control structure in corporate reporting as well as other aspects of an organization′s success. These associations include the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Cadbury Committee, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW), the Scottish Institute of Chartered Accountants (SICA), the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), and others. Business failures, management fraud, corporate misconduct, international bribery, and notorious business scandals in all sectors of business have prompted the US government to take drastic action on internal control reporting to safeguard public interest. Several professional and government committees were formed to study this precarious situation: the Treadway Commission, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) of the Treadway Commission, the Packard Commission, the Cohen Commission, the Adams Commission in Canada, the Cadbury Committee in the UK, and others. The principal motivation for the changing dynamics has been growing public pressure for greater corporate accountability. The government′s pressure on the accounting profession and management of public corporations has been pivotal in spearheading internal control reporting. Examines the role of professional associations, governmental agencies, and others in promulgating standards for internal control reporting, and the impact of legislation on this aspect of internal auditing in the USA and worldwide.

Using a sample of US nonprofit organizations, where the identity of the auditor in charge of the audit is revealed, I investigate whether individual auditor characteristics (gender, engagement size and tenure) are associated with audit quality.

To investigate how individual audit partner characteristics affect audit quality, I follow Petrovits et al. (2011) and Fitzgerald et al. (2018) who investigate client characteristics and partner tenure as determinants of ICDs in nonprofits. I add three characteristics of the auditor in charge – gender, engagement size and tenure – to their models. In additional analyses, I use subsamples partitioned by client risk and audit firm size, and find that individual auditor characteristics generally play a more significant role in the issuance of ICDs and QAOs for riskier clients than for less risky clients.

My results show that female auditors are more likely to report internal control deficiencies and issue qualified audit opinions (QAOs) to nonprofits. I also find that auditors with more Single Audit engagements within the same year are less likely to report ICDs. In addition, auditor tenure is negatively associated with the likelihood of issuing an ICD report, suggesting that auditors become complacent as the length of the auditor–client relationship lengthens or, alternatively, that they are better able to assist their clients in correcting ICDs and in maintaining stronger internal control environments as they gain client-specific knowledge over time. Additional analysis suggests tenure and engagement load results are sensitive to the sample specification employed.

One caveat of this study is that self-selection bias may be present when a client chooses an audit firm, the audit firm selects a client, and the audit firm assigns a partner to the engagement. Future study with more advanced econometric models is needed to mitigate self-selection bias. Another limitation is that my sample consists of nonprofit organizations and may not be generalizable to for-profit firms. Another caveat of this study is that the tenure variable is truncated compared to prior literature (e.g. Fitzgerald et al., 2018). Also given the rarity of audit quality measures in the nonprofit setting, internal control deficiencies and qualified opinions are used as proxies for audit quality because they reflect both the quality of audit work and the quality of organizations' internal control and financial reporting. Future studies with data including additional audit quality measures could shed more light on the topic.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, this study offers a more comprehensive examination on the impact that a broader set of individual auditor characteristics on audit quality in the nonprofit setting, compared to Fitzgerald et al.'s (2018) study. Second, the findings should be of interest to policymakers who recently mandated engagement partner disclosures from US audit firms (PCAOB, 2015b). Finally, another distinctive feature of this study is that I examine the impact of individual auditor characteristics on audit quality in a setting where Big 4 audit firms are not dominant.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of internal control opinions on individuals' judgments about investments.

The approach used is a behavioral experiment where risk assessments and judgments about investments are made for four internal control opinion scenarios.

The results indicate that the type of internal control opinion made no difference for either risk assessments or investment decisions.

Participants are provided with data sets that do not contain all of the information they may acquire when they make actual investment decisions. Also, there is a lack of real consequences for making good or poor investment decisions.

The type of internal control opinion has no effect on risk assessments or investing intentions. Thus, other considerations apparently dominate internal control opinions when making judgments about investments.

This is the first paper to examine whether intentions to invest might be affected by internal control opinions.

This paper reviews studies that have examined how accounting information impacts commercial lending judgments. Issues discussed involve the usefulness of accounting data in lending decisions, effects of different accounting methods on lenders’ judgments, bankruptcy and default judgments, and decision processes pertaining to the use of accounting information in lending decisions. Additionally, the paper reviews the research on how audits and other forms of assurance influence commercial loan officers’ judgments. Topics include the way perceived auditor independence influences loan officers’ judgments, the impact of financial statement audits and audit opinions on lending decisions, how internal control reports and other CPA firm reports influence loan decisions, ways in which audit report disclosures and wording impact lending decisions, how perceived auditor quality affects lending decisions, and the effects of limited assurance engagements on loan officers’ judgments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how internal auditing may recover from being one of the corporate governance gatekeepers that failed to prevent the global financial crisis.

This paper draws on the theory of professions and provides a brief analysis of internal auditing history, ending with an appraisal of contemporary status.

Internal auditing has not been “fit for purpose” and can be enhanced. Low expectations of internal audit are currently addressed by enhanced guidelines from a number of parties. Internal audit needs to move firmly into the corporate governance space – to audit corporate governance more effectively and to provide more dependable assurance to boards.

The global Institute of Internal Auditors can use recent enhanced internal auditing guidelines as a springboard to regain their lead. Internal audit needs to cut the umbilical cord that ties it to management. The accepted “dual reporting” of internal audit is flawed.

Society cedes professional status to an occupational group when it is in society’s best interests to do so. An attribute of a profession is its accent on serving the public interest. It is unsatisfactory that, five years after the global financial crisis broke, the international Standards for internal auditing still do not articulate the correct professional conduct on making external disclosures in the public interest when internal auditors are aware of serious wrongdoing not satisfactorily addressed internally.

This paper comprises a conceptual analysis to challenge the internal audit profession.

For the past 10 years, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has operated as an independent overseer of public company audits. Over 70 percent of PCAOB studies have been published since 2010, evidencing the increasing relevance of PCAOB-related research in recent years. Our paper reviews the existing literature on the PCAOB’s four primary functions – registration, standard-setting, inspections, and enforcement. In particular, we examine PCAOB registration trends and evaluate the effects of PCAOB registration requirements on the issuer audit market, as well as discuss the relative costs and benefits (e.g., auditor behavior changes, improvements in audit quality, auditor perceptions) of the 16 auditing standards the PCAOB passed in its first 10 years of operation. Further, we summarize the literature’s findings on the effects of the PCAOB inspection process on various facets of audit quality. Finally, we analyze the research concerning the PCAOB’s enforcement actions to determine how markets have responded to sanctions against auditors and audit firms. We contend that understanding and reviewing the effects of the PCAOB’s activities are important to future audit research because of the PCAOB’s authority over and oversight of the issuer audit profession. We also identify PCAOB-related research areas that have not been fully explored and propose several research questions intended to address these research areas.

In 2001, the US moved to regulate internal control reporting by management and auditors. While some jurisdictions have followed the lead of the US, many others have not. An important question, therefore, is the relevance of internal control to stakeholders. The more specific issue of the benefits of US-style regulation of internal control reporting is also topical. We review studies on the determinants of internal control quality and its economic consequences for stakeholders including investors, creditors, managers, auditors and financial analysts. We extend previous reviews by focusing on US studies published since 2013 as well as all non-US studies investigating IC quality including countries regulating IC disclosure as well as unregulated settings and both developed and developing economies. In doing so, we identify research questions where evidence remains mixed and new directions in which there are research opportunities.

Three main insights arise from our analysis. First, evidence on the economic consequences of internal control quality suggests that the quality of internal control can have a significant effect on decision making by users of financial information. Second, the results of research on the empirical association between ownership structure, certain board characteristics and internal control quality is generally mixed. Empirical evidence concerning the association between audit committee characteristics and internal control quality generally supports a positive and significant association. Finally, while studies in non-US jurisdictions are increasing, opportunities remain to explore the determinants and consequences of internal control in other jurisdictions. Our review provides evidence for policy makers of whether there are benefits from requiring management and auditors to report on internal control over financial reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and comment on recent enhanced pronouncements on internal auditing.

The paper uses content analysis of five 2012-2013 sources of guidance, set out in the tables of this paper and summarised within the text, together with conceptual interpretations.

Recent pronouncements respond, with considerable consensus, to stakeholder and public concerns and fill a partial vacuum left by The Institute of Internal Auditors' Standards. Principally this is about successfully enhancing the scope of internal audit and internal audit's independence from management.

While the paper is conceptual rather than empirical, it builds on the processes followed by the parties who developed the examples of enhanced guidance reviewed in this paper. Those processes included careful development by leaders in the field, public consultation of preliminary proposals, and final amended guidance based on feedback received.

There are implications for staffing of internal audit functions and the seniority and calibre of chief audit executives.

There has been no other attempt to map these developments. It has been done with a view to identifying possible ways forward for internal auditing, especially those which have a high degree of support and which are still to be incorporated into generally accepted internal auditing.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 (and the subsequent Government Management Reform Act of 1994) mandated federal agencies to prepare corporate-style annual financial statements and subject them to independent audit. Over a decade later, it is reasonable to ask what the consequences of CFO Act financial statements have been. Accrual accounting produces auditable financial statements that establish accountability, contribute to the credibility of financial information, and identify long-term financial issues; but financial statements are not linked to the processes for resource-allocation decisions, nor do they produce information needed by managers. Some of these shortcomings are explained by contextual and sectoral differences.