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...

Auditors play a major role in corporate governance and capital markets. Ex ante, auditors facilitate firms' access to finance by fostering trust among public investors. Ex post, auditors can prevent misbehavior and financial fraud by corporate insiders. In order to fulfill these goals, however,...

Previous theories have argued that incorporation tends to reduce both audit quality and audit fees (Dye, 1994, 1995). In contrast, this paper shows that the theoretical effects of incorporation depend on three factors. If most clients are financially healthy (and pose little risk of litigation),...

This article argues that the failure of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOx) to prohibit auditors for public companies from also providing tax services to audit clients or their executives and selling tax shelters to anyone remains a Trojan horse that threatens both the investing public and the...

An underlying objective of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is to provide investors with reliable information, which presumably should increases investor confidence in financial disclosures. In part to achieve this goal, managers now have personal legal liability for internal control over financial...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 of the U. S. was passed to instil investor confidence in financial reporting following the spectacular collapse of high ranking firms in the US. Sections 302 and 404 provide clear guidelines to both management and their auditors on their respective roles as well as...

This paper introduces internal control quality to study litigation risk which enrich the literature of how to reduce firms' litigation risk. This paper use listed company data from 2000-2015 in China A-share market to research how firms' internal control affect litigation risk, and which kind of...

We examine why many firms disclose internal control weaknesses (ICW) under section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley Act after previously reporting effective internal control (IC). We find that about half of the cross-sectional ICW determinant variables either do not change significantly from Year T-1 to...

This study provides evidence that binary signals in audit reports are unable to fully communicate underlying risks that are inherently continuous in nature. Specifically, we find that companies whose audit reports signal an improvement in internal control effectiveness relative to the prior year...

This study provides evidence that binary signals in audit reports are unable to fully communicate underlying risks that are inherently continuous in nature. Specifically, we find that companies whose audit reports signal an improvement in internal control effectiveness relative to the prior year...