We review the history of financial literacy, as it applies to public company audit committees; we report on a financial literacy quiz that we have given to over 1,400 members of corporate boards, not all audit committee members. We develop a classification to score the potential of corporate...

This paper considers how auditing practices became muddled in the US and the UK to create muddled corporate governance principles. The US 1933 law that required corporations to appoint an auditor was based on the prospectus provisions in the UK 1929 Companies Act to protect investors from fraud....

Following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, self-regulated peer reviews at accounting firms were replaced by independent inspections conducted by the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board. Critics of self-regulation had argued that the peer review program lacked credibility. This paper tests...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) was aimed at enhancing corporate governance, financial reporting, and audit functions. This study compares the market reaction of firms with weak and strong protection of shareholder rights to the passage of SOX. We find that firms with weak shareholder...

In this monograph we address several interrelated themes influencing the corporate governance debate in today's financial marketplace. These include board independence and effectiveness; the role and the independence of the auditor; shareholder rights and activism; and convergence to a global...

Following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, self-regulated peer reviews at accounting firms were replaced by independent inspections conducted by the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board. Critics of self-regulation had argued that the peer review program lacked credibility. This paper tests...

This paper was presented to generate debate about proposals developed by a 'Corporate Governance Council' set up by the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) to advise on new guidelines. The paper identifies the invalidity of the assumptions implicit in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US and the...

We examine the issue of auditor independence in a unique setting. Specifically, we test for auditor independence impairment among (1) private client firms, for which the risk of auditor reputation loss is lower than for publicly traded firms, and (2) in a low litigation environment (i.e.,...

The majority of previous studies investigating the different risk factors associated with financial fraud have focused on investigating misreporting (Persons (1995); McMullen (1996); Green and Choi (1997); Bell et al. (1991); Bell and Carcello (2000); Abbott et al. (2000)). A few studies have...