Purpose – The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to examine whether the quality of accruals, as measured by accrual persistence, improved in the post-SOX period, and second, to examine the degree to which SOX-related improvement in accrual persistence varies across companies depending...

This study examines three research questions. First, did accrual reliability improve in the post-SOX period? Second, do companies receiving higher-quality audits report accruals that are more reliable? Third, did the degree of SOX-related improvement in accrual reliability vary across companies...