This study examines the association between corporate governance and disclosures of material weaknesses (MW) in internal control over financial reporting. We study this association using MW reported under Sarbanes-Oxley Sections 302 and 404, deriving data on audit committee financial expertise from automated parsing of member qualifications from their biographies. We find that a lower likelihood of disclosing Section 404 MW is associated with relatively more audit committee members having accounting and supervisory experience, as well as board strength. Further, the nature of MW varies with the type of experience. However, these associations are not detectable using Section 302 reports. We also find that MW disclosure is associated with designating a financial expert without accounting experience, or designating multiple financial experts. We conclude that board and audit committee characteristics are associated with internal control quality. However, this association is only observable under the more stringent requirements of Section 404.

Calls from practice suggest that audit committee members with industry expertise can improve audit committee effectiveness. Nevertheless, regulators and the extant literature have focused on the financial expertise of the audit committee. We posit that audit committee industry knowledge is valuable because accounting guidance, estimates, and oversight of the external auditor are often linked to a company's operations within a particular industry. Taking a holistic view, we examine two measures of financial reporting quality (financial restatements and discretionary accruals) and two measures of external auditor oversight (audit and nonaudit fees). As predicted, we find that audit committee members who are both accounting and industry experts perform better than those with only accounting expertise. We also find that in certain instances, supervisory experts who are also industry experts perform better than supervisory experts alone. Overall, these results suggest that industry expertise, when combined with accounting expertise, can improve the effectiveness of the audit committee in monitoring the financial reporting process. Data Availability: All data are gathered from publicly available sources.

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We propose a new measure of accounting reporting complexity (ARC) based on the count of accounting items (XBRL tags) disclosed in 10-K filings. The preparation and disclosure of more accounting items is complicated because it requires greater knowledge of authoritative accounting standards. This aspect of complexity can increase the likelihood of mistakes, incorrect application of GAAP, and can ultimately lead to less credible financial reports. Consistently, we find that ARC is associated with a greater likelihood of misstatements and material weakness disclosures, longer audit delay, and higher audit fees. In comparison to commonly used measures of operating and linguistic complexity, the associations between ARC and these outcomes are more consistent, exhibit greater explanatory power, and have stronger economic significance. These and additional validation and robustness tests suggest that ARC more completely reflects accounting complexity. In addition, ARC exhibits several advantageous properties, including across- and within-firm variation, availability for the universe of SEC filers, and a direct connection to accounting, inherent in its derivation from detailed accounting disclosures. Finally, because it relies on a comprehensive set of detailed accounting data, ARC broadly captures accounting complexity, while, at the same time, it can be disaggregated into account-specific measures of complexity. JEL Classifications: M41; M43. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the paper. A similar version of ARC, based on company XBRL filings that were downloaded directly from the SEC, is available at http://www.xbrlresearch.com.

SUMMARY This paper investigates the overall impact of and the information made available by the recent audit partner disclosure requirement in the U.S. After a contentious comment period, the PCAOB released Rule 3211, which requires registered public accounting firms to disclose the name of the audit partner for every audit report it issues. In the first year of adoption, we find a significant increase in audit quality and audit fees and a significant decrease in audit delay. We collect information on partner gender, busyness, education, and social connections to explore whether these newly observable characteristics are associated with audit outcomes. We find that several of these characteristics are associated with variations in audit fees and audit delay, but no evidence of an association with audit quality. Overall, our findings suggest that the disclosure of partner name in Form AP enhances the audit information environment, which supports PCAOB motivation for Rule 3211.