本文从内部控制的三个关键点——内部控制实施、评价和审计师鉴证——分析了内部控制鉴证报告的信号失灵原因和甄别工具,采用我国上市公司数据进行检验并发现,公司披露鉴证报告与否和会计信息质量无关,但披露高质量(声誉)审计师签署的鉴证报告,公司的操控性应计更低,会计信息质量更高。研究结果表明,内部控制鉴证报告作为传递内部控制信息的二次信号是失灵的,而审计师质量具有信号甄别的作用。本文结论不仅有助于公司制定有效的内部控制信息披露策略,还为内部控制信息市场的监管导向决策提供依据。
The disclosure of internal control information has been drawing more and more attention to scholars and enterprises since the promulgation of SOX in 2002.A rich body of researches based their designs on an assumption that companies have more reliable accounting if they disclose the audit reports on internal control(ARICs).This paper,however,argues that the ARICs are not always reliable because auditors have the motivations and opportunities to cheat in ARICs in Chinese disclosure and audit environment.We hypothesize that disclosure of ARICs are not significant associate with smaller accounting accrual,but auditor quality or reputation plays a role of moderating variables in the relationship between disclosure of ARICs and accounting accrual.Those hypotheses are developed based on a conceptual model and tested by employing the ordinary least square,Tobit and 2-step least square regression technique.The results emerged from the data of Chinese listed firm over the period 2008-2009 show that whether companies disclose ARICs or not,they do not have a significant difference in accounting accrual.We also find that when companies disclose ARICs signed by auditors with more excellent reputation,they will report lower accounting accruals.All of robustness checks with alternative measurements on the accounting quality and auditor reputation are consistent with our hypotheses.The results of this paper indicate that the market of internal control information in China is a lemons market because all auditors are not honest.This study represents a departure from exiting literature by firstly challenging the reliability of ARICs and highlighting the importance of auditors,which provides law-makers with an explicit suggestion that greater efficiency in market of internal control information result from higher quality of auditor.An important area that how firm characteristics affect the reliability of ARIC is left to future research.