Risk Of Financial Misstatement Research Articles

The two sides of corporate social responsibility and the quality of internal control audit opinions

Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities provide a strong signal of management integrity, the involvement of the client in irresponsible CSR should alert the auditor to the risk of material misstatement. Framing management integrity assessments by relying on responsible CSR activities can lead to auditors' unintended alignment with their clients' preferred outcomes. Motivated by the increasing frequency of clean internal control opinions (ICOPs) regarding clients that subsequently misstate, we explore whether auditors' overreliance on responsible CSR influences the quality of ICOPs. We find that clients' CSR involvement is associated with fewer adverse ICOPs, but this CSR effect is asymmetric because it is only explained by responsible CSR activities and not by irresponsible CSR activities. Importantly, the ‘good side of CSR’ is associated with fewer adverse opinions being issued to misstated clients. Additional analyses show that only irresponsible CSR activities increase the risk of financial misstatements. Our findings provide support for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's warning that certain conditions inherent in the audit environment, such as the assessment of management integrity, can lead to auditors unconsciously favouring confirming evidence (represented by responsible CSR activities) instead of relying on disconfirming evidence (represented by irresponsible CSR activities) that could raise issues about management's integrity and ethical commitment.

Does Differentiated Key Audit Matter in Unqualified Audit Reports Indicate Increased Financial Misstatement Risk? Evidence from China*

AbstractThis study examines whether differentiated disclosure of key audit matter (KAM) in China indicates a higher financial misstatement risk. Our empirical study demonstrates that financial statements with less boilerplate KAM are more likely to be subsequently restated than those with more boilerplate KAM. This association is only pronounced for smaller auditing firms in stronger legal environments. Additionally, auditors who report differentiated KAM are likely to disclose more risk‐related information. Moreover, clients are more likely to restate financial reports when the KAM relates to managers' subjective estimations.

Analyzing earnings management preferences from business strategies

Purpose This study aims to examine the preference for earnings management (EM) strategies according to business strategies, namely, cost leadership strategies and differentiation strategies, Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed 262 samples of manufacturing and service companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the period 2019. Logistic regression analysis is used to test the company’s EM strategy preferences based on the applied business strategy. Findings The results prove that business strategy has a significant effect on EM strategy preferences. Companies that implement a cost leadership strategy tend to use an accrual form of EM rather than a real form of EM. Conversely, companies that implement a differentiation strategy tend to use a real form of EM. Research limitations/implications Theoretically, this study confirms that contingency theory can explain EM practice preferences based on business strategy. Practically, this study helps auditors and financial statement analysts in assessing the quality of financial statements, as well as the risk of financial misstatement based on the business strategy adopted by the companies. Originality/value Based on prior literature, research studies on the analysis of EM strategy preferences based on business strategy have been limited.

Accounting Policy Changes and Misstatement Risk

We examine how various types of accounting policy changes affect financial misstatement risk and the ways auditors mitigate that risk. We find greater misstatement risk for both idiosyncratic and industry-wide accounting policy changes and that auditors play an important role in mitigating these risks in some situations but not others. Higher quality auditors appear to mitigate the misstatement risk from industry-wide changes, but not idiosyncratic changes. Misstatement risk is also mitigated when auditors communicate accounting policy changes through explanatory paragraphs and preferability letters and when they identify material weaknesses. Our evidence suggests that accounting policy changes are associated with a heightened risk of misstating the financial statements and auditors do not fully mitigate these risks in their audits.

How do auditors respond to low annual report readability?

We show that increased audit effort is associated with lower annual report readability to compensate for a perceived increase in the risk of financial misstatement for United States (US) firms. In particular, we find that lower annual report readability is associated with longer audit delays and higher audit fees for Form 10-K for US auditors, suggesting that auditors spend more effort auditing clients when annual reports have lower readability. We also find that low readability increases the likelihood of auditors using more explanatory language in unqualified audit reports.

The SOX 404 control audit and the effectiveness of additional audit effort in lowering the risk of financial misstatements

We examine the effectiveness of additional audit effort in lowering the risk of financial misstatements for companies with internal control material weaknesses during three separate post-SOX time periods. Our findings suggest that additional audit effort (as proxied by abnormal audit fees) is effective in lowering the risk of financial misstatements for clients with weak internal controls during the Auditing Standard No. 2 regime (2004–2006), but not during the extant Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS5) regime or the earlier 2002–2004 pre-404 audit (but still post-SOX) time period. We contribute to the on-going debate about the potential benefits associated with the SOX 404 audit and, in particular, the emerging literature on the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the SOX 404 audit in improving the assessment of control risk under the extant AS5 regime (Schroeder and Shepardson in Account Rev 91(5):1513–1541, 2016). Collectively, our findings are consistent with the notion that extant PCAOB concerns about internal control quality under AS5 may be valid.

The effect of general counsel prominence on the pricing of audit services

We investigate the effect of corporate general counsel (GC) ascension to the senior management team on the pricing of audit services. Prior research suggests that the GC position may have a significant influence in setting the tone at the top by promoting corporate integrity, ethics, and serving as a governance and monitoring mechanism, but also recognizes that prominent GCs may face ethical dilemmas, causing them to disregard professional responsibilities to curry the favor of the CEO and other executives. Using audit fees to proxy for audit engagement risk, we find a negative association between GC ascension to top management and audit fees. We investigate the mechanisms behind this relation and find GC ascension is associated with a reduction in both default risk and financial misstatement risk, which supports auditors’ perceived reduction in client business risk and audit risk, respectively.

Auditor human capital and financial misstatement: Evidence from China

In this study, we examine whether education, as an important component of the human capital of auditors, is related to the occurrence of financial misstatement, and investigate the moderating effect of professional experience. Using a sample of 16,651 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market from 2003 to 2014, we find that the education level of signing auditors is significantly negatively associated with the likelihood of financial misstatement, which suggests that higher education can enhance the ethics and independence of auditors and mitigate the risk of financial misstatement. In addition, professional experience attenuates the negative relation between the education level of signing auditors and financial misstatement. Our findings are also robust to a variety of sensitivity tests, and our conclusions still hold after using a two-stage OLS-logistic regression to address the endogeneity problem. Lastly, the negative effect of education level on financial misstatement holds only for 985 Project universities, low individual-level (audit-firm-level) client importance, and state-owned enterprises.

Does the use of honorific appellations in audit reports connote higher financial misstatement risk? Evidence from China

PurposeFrom the sociolinguistic perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether the honorific and actual-name appellations that Chinese auditors use to address clients in audit reports connote differential financial misstatement risk. Specifically, the authors hypothesize that auditors’ use of honorifics signals their inferior social status relative to their clients, thereby leading to compromised auditor independence, lower audit quality, and higher financial misstatement risk.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a sample of manually coded appellation data from audit reports of Chinese public firms between 2003 and 2012 to conduct the research.FindingsThe authors find significantly greater financial misstatements, both in terms of likelihoods and magnitudes, for companies addressed by honorifics than for those addressed by actual names. Moreover, compared to auditors’ consistent honorific usage, discretionary honorific usage has a stronger positive association with misstatements. The authors further show that the positive association between honorific usage and client misstatement risk weakens when the audit firm is a Top 10 accounting firms in China, is an industry specialist, is formed as a partnership, or resides in a more concentrated audit market.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the sociolinguistics literature in accounting and provides evidence supporting the reform proposed by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board to enhance the usefulness of audit reporting.

Managerial overconfidence, ability, firm-governance and audit fees

Prior studies document that managerial overconfidence potentially increases the risk of financial misstatements, and that overconfident managers purchase lower quality audits and pay lower audit fees. As a part of the research that evaluates the information value of managerial characteristics to auditors, our study examines how the relationship between managerial overconfidence and audit fees is impacted by managerial ability, and board and audit committee effectiveness in the post-Sarbanes–Oxley (post-SOX) environment. In general, we find a significantly positive relationship between managerial overconfidence and audit fees consistent with the supply-side risk based perspective of audit pricing. However, this relationship is significantly attenuated in higher managerial ability firms where overconfident managers are better able to make proper accounting estimates and judgements required for producing reliable financial statements, and synthesize firm-specific information into appropriate forward looking projections. We find that on an average, the overconfident firms with higher managerial ability pay 6.3% lower audit fees than the overconfident firms with lower managerial ability. Our analyses further show that board characteristics positively impact the relationship between managerial overconfidence and audit fees, suggesting that stronger board monitoring increases the demand for higher quality audits to mitigate the reporting risk of the overconfident firms. On an average, the firms with managerial overconfidence pay additional 9.3% higher audit fees when they are subject to stronger and more effective board oversight. However, we find weaker evidence on the effect of audit committee characteristics on audit fees of the overconfident firms. Our primary results hold for a battery of supplemental tests including the tests using propensity-score matched sample. The study contributes to audit fee and corporate governance literature, and has useful implications for regulators, accounting practitioners, and auditors.

Nonprofessional investor perceptions of the partial remediation of IT and non-IT control weaknesses: An experimental investigation

In this study, we investigate whether nonprofessional investors' judgments about a firm with known and disclosed material weaknesses in internal control as required by the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 depend on the remediation strategy used by the firm. Analysis of SOX internal control weakness disclosures reveals that firms (1) often have multiple internal control weaknesses, (2) frequently have a mix of information technology (IT) and non-IT control weaknesses, and (3) invariably fail to remediate all control weaknesses in the period they are identified. We design an experiment to investigate how nonprofessional investors respond to remediation of a subset of disclosed material weaknesses in internal control, when a firm discloses a remediation plan that prioritizes the remediation of an IT (non-IT) internal control weakness leaving a non-IT (IT) weakness unremediated. We apply counterfactual theory to the future oriented remediation setting and find that investors favor a firm remediation strategy that prioritizes the remediation of an IT weakness over a strategy that prioritizes the remediation of a non-IT weakness. We further find that perceived effectiveness of remediation, financial misstatement risk attributed to the unresolved internal control weakness, and management credibility fully mediate the relation between company remediation strategies and investing judgments. These findings should be informative to both auditors and management when confronted with a range of IT and non-IT internal control weaknesses following the initial identification and disclosure of multiple material weaknesses as required by SOX.

Does the Use of Honorific Appellations in Audit Reports Connote Higher Financial Misstatement Risk? Evidence from China

From the sociolinguistic perspective, this study examines whether the honorific and actual-name appellations that Chinese auditors use to address clients in audit reports connote differential financial misstatement risk. Specifically, we hypothesize that auditors’ use of honorifics signals their inferior social status relative to their clients, thereby leading to compromised auditor independence, lower audit quality, and higher financial misstatement risk. We find significantly greater financial misstatements, both in terms of likelihoods and magnitudes, for companies addressed by honorifics than for those addressed by actual names. Moreover, compared to auditors’ consistent honorific usage, discretionary honorific usage has a stronger positive association with misstatements. We further show that the positive association between honorific usage and client misstatement risk weakens when the audit firm is a Top 10 accounting firm in China, is an industry specialist, is formed as a partnership, or resides in a more concentrated audit market. This study contributes to the sociolinguistics literature in accounting and provides evidence supporting the reform proposed by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) to enhance the usefulness of audit reporting.

Austerity, Audit, and Accountability : New Public Management and the Privatisation of Local Audit in England

This paper examines the experience of the local audit reforms in England against the doctrines and principles of New Public Management (NPM). NPM is a term applied to public sector reforms which aim to enhance both performance and accountability by adopting governance and accountability mechanisms from the private sector. The local public audit reforms, which were initiated in England in 2010, abolished the independent specialist Audit Commission, effectively privatising the financial audit function and severely curtailing the extent to which local public bodies are subject to performance audit. As with other state audit bodies, the Audit Commission had acted as both regulator and provider of audit services to local bodies, such as local authorities and local health service organisations. A review of evidence to date shows that short term efficiency gains were made in financial audit and that there is prima facie evidence of greater accountability to local people. However these gains have been made at the cost of : first, a severe reduction in performance audit, a key function of public audit in delivering both democratic and managerial accountability, and second, a longer-term risk to audit quality and thus to the risk of financial mis-statements. In summary, the evidence suggests that the principles of NPM were appropriated to legitimise the reforms, after the decision to abolish the Audit Commission was taken. In contrast, the rhetoric prior to abolition suggests that the reforms were, instead, inspired more by a personal and political agenda than one of rational economic decision making.

The effect of managerial stock ownership on the relationship between material internal control weaknesses and audit fees

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to examine the effect of managerial stock ownership on the relationship between material internal control weaknesses (ICW) and audit fees.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses multivariate regression analyses on a sample of 1,578 ICW and 1,578 pair-matched (based on both propensity score and managerial stock ownership) non-ICW firm observations for a period from 2004 to 2010 to investigate how managerial incentive at various stock ownership levels impacts the relationship between material ICW and audit fees.FindingsFor the firms with low managerial stock ownership (up to 5 per cent stockholdings), the authors find no significant effect of managerial ownership on the positive relationship between audit fees and ICW. However, the impact of managerial stock ownership on the relationship between ICW and audit fees is significantly positive when managerial ownership is medium, i.e. more than 5 per cent and less than or equal to 25 per cent stockholdings, and the managerial ownership effect is even higher when managerial stock ownership is high, i.e. more than 25 per cent stockholdings. The result is especially robust for the ICW firms with high managerial stock ownership (i.e. where managers hold more than 25 per cent equity stake in the firms). The additional analyses further show that this managerial ownership effect is more pronounced when the firms suffer from company-level material control weaknesses that have pervasive negative effect on financial reporting quality.Research limitations/implicationsThe results imply that in a low managerial ownership firms with substantial misalignment between manager and shareholder incentives, managerial stock ownership has little effect on the ICW and audit fee relationship. But when managers’ ownership interest is at a high level, they are more prone to purchase higher-quality audit service to reduce the risk of financial misstatements due to material ICW, which results in higher audit fees. The results add to the audit fee literature by suggesting that managerial incentive at various ownership levels is a critical governance factor that impacts auditor’s fee structure especially when higher reporting risk exists due to material ICW.Originality/valuePrior literature documents that there is some relationship between managerial attributes and earnings quality; however, there is no substantive empirical evidence on the effect of managerial stock ownership on audit pricing when client companies face higher risk of financial misreporting as a result of material ICW. In this study, the authors seek answers to these empirical questions and fill the gap in the literature.

The Strategic Effects of Auditing Standard No. 5 in a Multi-Location Setting

SUMMARY Auditing Standard No. (AS) 5 provides guidance in the required audit of internal control over financial reporting and its integration into the financial statement audit. AS 5 advocates a “top-down” approach, in which control testing helps the auditor assess the risk of financial misstatement across multiple locations. We consider a manager who oversees two locations and who has private information about internal control strength in each location. Only when controls are weak can the manager commit fraud. We show how the manager's opportunity to commit fraud and informational characteristics of internal control tests impact the manager's probability choice of fraud and the auditor's choice of substantive test effort.

Does Auditor Explanatory Language in Unqualified Audit Reports Indicate Increased Financial Misstatement Risk?

ABSTRACTAccording to auditing standards, explanatory language added at the auditor's discretion to unqualified audit reports should not indicate increased financial misstatement risk. However, an auditor is unlikely to add language that would strain the auditor-client relationship absent concerns about the client's financial statements. Using a sample of 30,825 financial statements issued with unqualified audit opinions during 2000–2009, we find that financial statements with audit reports containing explanatory language are significantly more likely to be subsequently restated than financial statements without such language. We find that this positive association is driven by language that references the division of responsibility for performance of the audit, adoption of new accounting principles, and previous restatements. In addition, we find that (1) “emphasis of matter” language that discusses mergers, related-party transactions, and management's use of estimates predicts restatements related to these matters, and that (2) the financial statement accounts noted in the explanatory language typically correspond to the accounts subsequently restated. In sum, our results suggest that present-day audit reports communicate some information about financial reporting quality.

Does Auditor 'Commentary' in Unqualified Audit Reports Reflect Financial Misstatement Risk?

According to auditing standards, explanatory language added at the auditor’s discretion to unqualified audit reports should not indicate increased financial misstatement risk. However, an auditor is unlikely to add language that would strain the auditor-client relationship absent concerns about the client’s financial statements. Using a sample of 30,825 financial statements issued with unqualified audit opinions during 2000-2009, we find that financial statements with audit reports containing explanatory language are significantly more likely to be subsequently restated than financial statements without such language. We find that this positive association is driven by language that references the division of responsibility for performance of the audit, adoption of new accounting principles, and previous restatements. In addition, we find that (1) “emphasis of a matter” language that discusses mergers, related party transactions, and management’s use of estimates predicts restatements related to these matters and that (2) the financial statement accounts noted in the explanatory language typically correspond to the accounts subsequently restated. In sum, our results suggest that present-day audit reports communicate some information about financial reporting quality.

Fee Assessment: The Audit Price Tag of Innovative IT Solutions

ABSTRACTNow in its sixth decade, the field of business information systems continues to advance at an astonishing pace. As information technology (IT) based solutions continue to evolve, they get ever more sophisticated and integral to the operational processes of a company. Investment in information systems (IS) has benefitted companies by facilitating cost savings through implementation of operational efficiencies and adding value through differentiation of offerings and advanced data analysis. IT capabilities have also been credited with the creation of competitive advantage. While business success thrives on innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, financial audit relies on systematic, controlled and measurable processes and reporting. In this paper we explore the intersection of innovative information systems and the financial audit process. As information systems innovate the business strategy, we seek to understand the impact on the audit process. In this study, we capture auditors' perceptions through an analysis of the relationship between innovative IT solutions and audit fees. Findings indicate that sophisticated information systems contribute significantly to increases in audit fees. Seemingly, innovation in IS has induced auditors to expend more effort in minimizing the risk of financial misstatement rather than increasing their confidence in the controls that the systems provide.

Auditors' Response to Political Connections and Cronyism in Malaysia

ABSTRACTThis paper extends the literature on the role of political economy in financial reporting and auditing by testing two hypotheses. The first hypothesis predicts that there will be a greater increase in audit effort and audit fees for Malaysian firms with political connections, as a result of the Asian financial crisis, than for non‐politically connected firms because these firms have a higher risk of financial misstatements. The second hypothesis predicts that the audit fees of politically connected firms will decline when capital controls are introduced by the government as a ploy to financially assist politically connected firms to rebound from the crisis, and thus reduces the risk of financial misstatements. The results show that there is a greater increase in audit fees for firms with political connections than for non‐politically connected firms as a result of the Asian financial crisis. However, there is a decline in audit fees for politically connected firms after the capital controls are implemented.