The functioning of corporate audit committees was criticized in recent years by the Treadway Commission, the Public Oversight Board, the Kirk Panel, and the SEC Chairman. In response, the NYSE and NASD sponsored the Blue Ribbon Committee (BRC) on Improving the Effectiveness of Corporate Audit Committees. The BRC Report includes recommendations aimed at strengthening director independence and qualifications, and highlights the role of internal auditors in assisting audit committees in the corporate governance process. Moreover, the first three recommendations of the BRC relate to audit committee composition: absence of inside or “gray” directors, and presence of a member with financial expertise. This study examines the association between audit committee composition and the committee's interaction with internal auditing. Our results, based on responses from chief internal auditors of 114 public companies, indicate that committees comprised solely of independent directors and with at least one member having an accounting or finance background are more likely to (1) have longer meetings with the chief internal auditor; (2) provide private access to the chief internal auditor; and (3) review internal audit proposals and results of internal auditing. These findings provide empirical support for the BRC's recommendations related to audit committee composition.

An increasing number of firms have restated previously issued financial statements in recent years. Legislators, regulators, and others speculate that restatements are associated with fees received by auditors for nonaudit services (nonaudit fees). The current study provides empirical evidence on the association between firms that restate financial statements and the nonaudit service fees received by incumbent auditors during reporting periods that required restatement. We identify a sample of 110 firms that restated financial statements previously filed with the SEC for fiscal years 2000 or 2001, and provided relevant audit and nonaudit fee data. The SEC requires firms to disclose these fee data beginning in proxy statements filed on or after February 5, 2001. We compare the fees paid by the restatement sample with fee data for 3,481 firms that filed proxies with the SEC from February 5, 2001 to August 31, 2001 and develop benchmarks for expected nonaudit fees, fee ratio, and total fees. Using these benchmarks, we calculate the unexpected values for these measures and investigate whether restatement firms differ from the control firms. Our findings of no significant differences between the restatement and control samples for unexpected nonaudit fees, fee ratios, and total fees do not support concerns that either nonaudit fees or total fees inappropriately influence the audit and lead to restatements.

SUMMARY: Corporate scandals and the resulting passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 significantly affected the auditing profession. The quality of financial statement audits was called into questioned and the media and regulators held audit firms responsible. Several studies found evidence of an increase in the issuance of going-concern opinions after the passage of SOX relative to earlier time periods (Geiger et al. 2005; Nogler 2008; Myers et al. 2008). Auditors, it appears, behave more conservatively when the profession is in the headlines. We replicate and extend this research to determine whether the heightened conservatism continues or whether it fades as time passes. We examine audit opinions issued 12 months or less prior to a bankruptcy filing for 565 companies from 2000–2008. Our findings indicate that while the proportion of going-concern modifications increases sharply in 2002–2003 compared to 2000–2001, it declines in the periods that follow, ultimately returning to its pre-Enron level.

SUMMARY: We examine post-restatement audit fees and executive turnover for a sample of firms that restated their 2003 financial statements. We investigate and find evidence that audit fees are higher for restatement firms compared with a matched-pair control group of non-restatement firms. We propose that the higher audit fees reflect a cost of both an increase in perceived audit risk and a loss of organizational legitimacy. Prior literature suggests that changing top management is a response to a legitimacy crisis; thus we expect to find that executive turnover moderates the positive relationship between restatement and audit fees. Our results indicate that a change in CFO for a restatement firm moderates the increased audit fee, but a change in CEO does not.

Following enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002, Big 4 auditors claimed to have a more conservative policy regarding client retention and acceptance decisions. In this paper, we examine the resignations of Big 4 audit firms in periods before and after SOX. We find that Big 4 audit firms resigned from more audit clients in 2003 than in 2001, and that the 2003 group of clients had significantly lower measures of financial stress. Our results are robust to adjustments for differences in bankruptcy probability between 2003 and 2001. We also find that the relative increases in fees charged by the Big 4 successor following the resignation of a Big 4 predecessor are higher in 2003 than in 2001; for clients with a non-Big 4 successor firm following a Big 4 resignation, we find a significant fee discount in 2001 but not in 2003. Overall, the results support the view that auditors are much more conservative in the post-Enron/SOX period than in the immediately preceding period.