We investigate the relationship between audit fees and subsequent financial statement restatements in the years following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). After controlling for internal control quality, we find that abnormal audit fees are negatively associated with the likelihood that financial statements are subsequently restated. This result conflicts with prior work that finds that audit fees are positively associated with future restatements. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the notion that restatements reflect low audit effort or underestimated audit risk in the periods leading up to the restatement year.
SUMMARY: We investigate the relationship between future financial statement restatements and audit report lags. Audit report lags are defined as the number of days between the fiscal year-end and the date of the audit report. Ex ante, it is not clear whether there should be a relationship and, if there is, whether that relationship would be negative or positive. We first discuss the underlying conceptual rationale for both negative and positive associations, then we use a two-stage approach to empirically examine the relationship. We find that compared to non-restating firms, firms that eventually restate their financial statements have longer abnormal audit report lags. In subsequent testing, we consider a number of factors that may undermine additional audit effort and, thus, influence the association between audit report lag and subsequent restatements. Of the factors examined, we find that time pressure appears to be associated with increased probability of financial restatements.
Prior research addressing questions such as whether investors respond to a hypothesized information event used tests of unusual return and/or trading activity as alternative measures of investor response. We investigate which of these two metrics maximizes the likelihood that a researcher correctly detects the presence or absence of a response. Building on the repeated-sample framework established in Brown and Warner (1980, 1985) and Dyckman et al. (1984), we provide evidence that (1) volume-based metrics, especially measures based on numbers of transactions, provide more powerful tests of investor response to public disclosures than do return-based metrics; and (2) supplementing return-based measures with trading-based measures increases the power of tests designed to detect investor response. Our conclusions are particularly relevant when power is critical (i.e., when sample sizes are small or anticipated investor response is small). Our evidence also suggests that before concluding that investors do not respond to a public disclosure, based on a returns analysis, researchers should confirm the nonresponse inference with trading-based measures.
This exploratory study presents evidence on the general characteristics, risks, and controls of all non-profit organizations (NPOs) reporting a fraud (asset diversion) between 2009 and 2015. Compared to NPOs that did not report a fraud, the fraud-reporting NPOs were larger, older, more likely to be a 501c3, and urban. Data from the Form 990 provided information on the risks and controls present. Risks were positively associated with higher levels of reported fraud for all sizes of NPOs. However, controls were more often related to lower levels of fraud only for larger NPOs, with the level of controls present increasing with the size of the organization. We also identify new variables that should add to our understanding and also variables used in prior studies that may not have enough variance to add any insight. Based on the results from this study, we provide suggestions for future research.
SUMMARY In this paper, we summarize our recent research into the association between abnormal audit report lags (the length of time between the fiscal year-end and the audit report date) and the likelihood of future restatements (Blankley, Hurtt, and MacGregor 2014). We find that as the audit report lag increases, the likelihood of a future restatement increases, and this dynamic appears to be associated with the effect of time pressure on the auditor. We will first summarize the motivation for the study, then discuss the empirical methods used, explain our results, and conclude with a discussion of the practical applications to practitioners.
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