中国证券市场年报补丁公司特征研究

在上市公司午报披露之后，屡屡可见公司对年报的各类补充公告与更正公告（即年报补丁），年报朴丁不仅受到媒体的强烈抨击，也为监管部门所关注。本文选取发布2001～2003年年报补丁的公司作为研究样本，并分年度、行业、公司规模选取配对样本，考察补丁公司的经济特征，研究表明，相对配对样本而言，补丁公司的业绩较差，公目的总资产增长较快，较少设置审计委员会，且审计质量较差。     

提高我国注册会计师审计独立性的对策探讨

注册会计师只有在审计过程中真正做到客观独立,才能保证审计信息的可信性,从而树立起职业声誉,体现其社会价值.提高我国注册会计师审计独立性应从完善注册会计师的委托聘约机制、明确注册会计师的法律责任、规范会计师事务所的组织形式、提高注册会计师的自身素质、健全注册会计师的外部监管机制、优化执业环境等方面入手.     

The effect of mandatory auditor assignment and non-audit service on audit fees: Evidence from Korea

In Korea, regulators could assign auditors to firms. We investigate the relationship among audit fees, mandatory auditor assignment, and the joint provision of non-audit and auditor services in Korea. We find that assigned auditors charge significantly higher audit fees than freely selected auditors. We also find that the joint provision of non-audit and audit services does intensify the relation between auditor assignment and audit fees. Combined with the results of other studies that have shown that firms audited by assigned auditors report smaller amounts of discretionary accruals than firms audited by freely selected auditors, our results suggest the possibility that mandatory auditor assignment may improve auditor independence.     

An international study of internal audit function quality

We investigate organisational and environmental factors that influence firms’ incentives to develop high-quality internal audit functions (IAFs) by using a unique international sample formed by matching proprietary data from a global internal auditor survey with public data obtained from Worldscope. Concerning organisational factors, we find that a positive relationship exists between IAF quality and firm complexity and confirm that complex firms have a higher demand for monitoring and advising and, therefore, a greater need for formal controls. In addition, IAF quality is positively related to board monitoring and audit committee diligence but negatively associated with CEO power, which suggests that IAF quality is influenced by other key players in corporate governance. Regarding environmental factors, we document that IAF quality is positively associated with industry competition, which implies that a firm’s incentive for a high-quality IAF is enhanced when confronted with greater environmental uncertainty. Furthermore, IAF quality has a significantly positive relationship with our self-constructed index of IAF requirements included in national corporate governance codes, which indicates that strong home-country corporate governance codes play a role in fostering IAF development.     

Classical meets modern in the IDEA protocol for structured expert judgement

Expert judgement is pervasive in all forms of risk analysis, yet the development of tools to deal with such judgements in a repeatable and transparent fashion is relatively recent. This work outlines new findings related to an approach to expert elicitation termed the IDEA protocol. IDEA combines psychologically robust interactions among experts with mathematical aggregation of individual estimates. In particular, this research explores whether communication among experts adversely effects the reliability of group estimates. Using data from estimates of the outcomes of geopolitical events, we find that loss of independence is relatively modest and it is compensated by improvements in group accuracy.     

Responsiveness of Auditors to the Audit Risk Standards: Unique Evidence from Big 4 Audit Firms

We examine the effect of changes in audit risk standards on the conduct of financial statement audits in a European setting. We investigate this by analysing the audit hours and audit fees for clients of Big 4 audit firms in Finland in 1996 and 2010. Our results show that audit firms became more sensitive to clients’ business risk due to the introduction of the new audit risk standards, with more audit hours allocated to owner-managed companies in 2010 than in 1996, and fewer audit hours allocated to low-risk clients in 2010 than in 1996. Also, the labour mix in the audit team changed for owner-managed companies, with a greater work load carried by junior auditors in 2010 than in 1996. Regarding the price of audit, we find an increase in audit fees for clients with high business risk, while audit fees remained at roughly the same level for low-risk clients. These findings should be of interest to the auditing profession and those involved in the development of auditing regulations.     

Annual report readability and corporate agency costs

Annual reports are the main sources of information for outside investors’ investment decisions and enable shareholders to supervise the management. Difficulties with the readability of these reports may therefore have serious consequences. Using 19,221 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2001 to 2015, we investigate the association between annual report readability and corporate agency costs, where readability is proxied by report file length and/or file size. We find that firms with better annual report readability experience lower agency costs, and the negative association between readability and agency costs is more pronounced in firms with higher external audit quality, internal control quality or analyst coverage. These results hold after several robustness checks. The positive effect of annual report readability is stronger in private firms than in state-owned enterprises, and becomes stronger after the implementation of new accounting standards in 2007. Readable annual reports can help in monitoring corporate insiders’ opportunistic behavior and thus reduce agency costs.     

推行精细化管理 提高内部审计效能

全面推行工程项目精细化管理,对于建筑施工企业的发展具有重大的意义,随着精细化管理逐步展开,对内部审计工作也提出了更为严格的要求。     

市政工程造价预结算审核要点与解决对策

在市政工程造价管理和质量控制过程中,相关单位必须重视预结算审核工作,即严格按照我国相关法律法规和相关要求,对预结算加以全面核算,及时发现预结算中存在的问题,且严格监控整个市政工程的建设过程,对市政工程进行科学合理的目标管理,从而有效保证市政工程建设的正常开展。本文主要阐述市政工程造价预结算审核要点,并结合存在的问题提出切实可行的解决对策。     

Balance sheet conservatism and audit reporting conservatism

Financial reports are prepared on a going‐concern (GC) basis rather than a liquidation basis even when companies are highly distressed. This allows distressed companies to report book values of assets that greatly exceed their liquidation values, implying a lack of conservatism in the balance sheet. We argue that auditors issue going‐concern opinions in order to warn investors about this lack of balance sheet conservatism. This argument leads to two testable hypotheses. First, for companies that are at risk of bankruptcy, auditors are more likely to issue GC opinions when the book values of assets under the GC assumption are high relative to the expected liquidation values of assets (i.e., when the GC assumption causes the balance sheet to lack conservatism). Second, for companies that enter bankruptcy, the issuance of a prior GC opinion has predictive information content with respect to the wedge between the book values of assets and the future liquidation values of those same assets. Our results strongly support both hypotheses. The findings are important because they indicate that conservative audit reporting helps to compensate for a lack of conservatism in the balance sheet, which arises because the GC assumption permits the book values of assets to exceed their liquidation values.