The IAASB maintains that expert assurance practitioners are unable to quantify limited assurance achieved for nonfinancial information and presumes users can read practitioner-customized procedure descriptions to differentiate information reliability between “inconsequential” and “high.”...

Auditors must ensure that their audit plans budget sufficient time for key audit procedures. Research has shown that insufficient audit time budgets can be detrimental to audit quality. We examine whether framing audit procedures negatively (e.g., assess whether management's assumptions are not...

We use incremental and joint implementation of multiple SOX-based control effectiveness disclosure and audit mandates to assess relative performance of alternatives for small U.S. public companies. Using data from several low and high effort management disclosure and audit regimes implemented...

In the decade since the July, 2002 passage of the quickly-legislated Sarbanes-Oxley Act, audit production in the U.S. has been substantially augmented by implementation of mandated internal control process audits. Audit production changes are important as the control audit mandate is unique and...

This paper investigates the effect of internal control deficiencies and their remediation on accrual quality. We first document that firms reporting internal control deficiencies have lower quality accruals as measured by accrual noise and absolute abnormal accruals relative to firms not...

Auditing standards now mandate that group auditors determine and implement appropriate component materiality amounts, which ultimately affect group audit scope, reliability, and value. However, standards are silent about how these amounts should be determined and methods being used in practice...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates management evaluation and independent audits of internal control effectiveness. The mandate is costly to firms but may yield benefits through lower information risk that translates into lower cost of equity. We use unaudited pre-SOX 404 disclosures and SOX...

To what degree are audit fees for U.S. firms with publicly traded equity higher than fees for otherwise similar firms with private equity? The answer is potentially important for evaluating regulatory regime design efficiency and for understanding audit demand and production economics. For U.S....

This paper uses firms' disclosures of internal control problems prior to audits mandated by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) to investigate the economic factors that expose firms to internal control failure risks and managements' incentives to discover and report internal control...