The so-called “revolving door” for employees moving from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to the accounting firms it regulates has received heightened scrutiny recently. Hendricks, Landsman, and Peña-Romera (HLP) (2019) document that large audit firms exhibit improved...

The PCAOB’s audit-quality framework posits that superior inputs are essential for achieving high audit quality, and these inputs depend on the accounting firm’s ability to recruit and retain quality personnel. However, the link between these inputs and audit quality has gone largely...

Financial scandals such as those surrounding the Enron-Andersen debacle provoke concerns that auditors lack independence when faced with influential clients, and are unwilling to respond to client risks by resigning. Unlike previous studies that examine whether client influence affects audit...

Purpose: The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 exempts small, non-accelerated filers from compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) Section 404b internal control audits. However, these firms are required to comply with other internal control regulations, namely, SOX Sections 302 and 404a, starting in...

This study examines companies' costs to comply with SOX 404 and identifies factors that are associated with these costs. SOX 404 costs can be classified into three categories: internal labor costs, external consulting and technology expenses, and auditor attestation charges. While prior research...

Corporate hiring of former audit personnel to fill key financial positions is a practice that has attracted attention from the media, the accounting profession, and regulators. The concern is that the former external auditor who now holds a key position with the client may be able to circumvent...

Recent debates on audit committee financial expertise have focused on quot;accountingquot; and quot;non-accountingquot; financial experts. A significant proportion of firms do not appoint accounting financial experts (i.e., persons with specialized accounting/auditing experience) to their audit...

Regulators have frequently expressed concerns about corporate earnings management. Audit committees are expected to monitor managers' tendencies to manipulate their earnings numbers. The extant literature until now has focused on managers' incentives to manipulate annual earnings numbers....