This study examines whether the effectiveness of the audit committee and the board of directors is associated with firms' timeliness in the remediation of material weaknesses (MWs) in internal control. The sample comprises accelerated filers that disclosed at least one MW from July 2003 to December 2004 under Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Using logistic regression analyses, I find that firms with larger audit committees, audit committees with greater nonaccounting financial expertise, and more independent boards are more likely to remediate MWs in a timely manner. These results suggest that the audit committee and the board play an important role in monitoring the remediation of MWs. Overall, the study contributes to our understanding of the effectiveness of the audit committee and the board under the SOX regime. The study also identifies important determinants of firms' timeliness in the remediation of MWs, which is key to improving financial reporting quality and restoring investor confidence.

This study examines the relation between internal controls and conditional conservatism (“conservatism”), also referred to as timely loss recognition. Using a sample of firms that disclose material weaknesses (MWs) in internal controls under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), we find a positive relation between internal control quality and conservatism. Specifically, firms with MWs exhibit lower conservatism than firms without such weaknesses. Further, firms that disclose MWs and subsequently remediate these weaknesses exhibit greater conservatism than firms that continue to have MWs. Overall, these results are consistent with strong internal controls acting as a mechanism that facilitates conservatism. Our study contributes to the literature on the reporting effects of strong versus weak internal controls.

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Auditing Standard No. 2 introduced integrated audits of internal control over financial reporting and the financial statements. Since the internal control and audit reports are joint products of the audit process, we examine whether the issuance of an internal control material weakness opinion (MWO) influences, other things equal, the issuance of a going concern audit opinion (GCO). Using a sample of financially stressed companies, we find that the issuance of a MWO increases the likelihood of a GCO, suggesting that auditors do respond to the uncertainty surrounding a MWO by issuing a GCO. Further analyses reveal that the positive association between MWO and GCO obtains for company-level material weaknesses, which are known to be difficult to “audit-around”, and for more litigious industries. We also compare these results with those for a Section 302 sample with manager-reported (but not audited) material weaknesses, and find that the material weakness reported under Section 302 does not impact the GCO. Hence, the auditors respond to the uncertainty surrounding material weaknesses only when they issue MWOs, and not due to the existence of material weaknesses per se – that is, the issuance of a MWO seems to induce further conservatism in the auditor’s GCO decision. We conclude that researchers and policymakers should consider the overall effect of Section 404 on the financial statement audit.

In this study, we examine whether internal control over financial reporting affects firm operational efficiency. We find that operational efficiency, derived from frontier analysis, is significantly lower among firms with material weaknesses in internal control relative to firms without such weaknesses. We also find that the remediation of material weaknesses leads to an improvement in operational efficiency. Additional analyses indicate that the negative effect of material weaknesses on operational efficiency is stronger for firms with a greater demand for higher quality information for decision making, for weaknesses that are deemed to be more severe, and to a certain extent, for smaller firms. Overall, our study extends the literature by presenting systematic evidence on the effect of effective internal control on operational efficiency and informs the debate over the costs and benefits of the internal control reporting requirements under the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002.

Some firms voluntarily make disclosures about the controls and processes in place to ensure the reliability of fair value estimates. Consistent with these disclosures being driven by investors’ concerns about the reliability of their SFAS 157 estimates, we find that firms with more opaque estimates are more likely to provide such disclosures. We then examine whether these disclosures improve investors’ perception about the reliability of fair value estimates. We find that they are associated with higher market pricing and lower information risk for Level 3 estimates. Further analyses of the disclosures reveal that the following types of information are particularly important to investors: discussion of the external and independent pricing of fair value estimates and their proper classification according to the SFAS 157 hierarchy. Overall, our results suggest that the voluntary reliability disclosures that firms provide beyond SFAS 157’s three-level estimates help reduce investors’ uncertainty toward the more opaque fair value estimates.

We examine the association between corporate tax aggressiveness and the profitability of insider trading under the assumption that insider trading profits reflect managerial opportunism. We document that insider purchase profitability, but not sales profitability, is significantly higher on average in more tax aggressive firms. We also find that the positive association between tax aggressiveness and insider purchase profitability is attenuated for firms with more effective monitoring and is accentuated for firms with a more opaque information environment. In addition, we provide empirical evidence that tax aggressiveness is significantly associated with greater insider sales volume in the fiscal year prior to a stock price crash. Finally, we find that the association between tax aggressiveness and insider purchase profitability weakens after the introduction of FIN 48, consistent with the increased transparency of tax positions under the new disclosure requirement reducing insiders' information advantage and hence their ability to profit from insider trading. To the extent that insider trading profits reflect managerial opportunism, our results are consistent with managers exploiting the opacity arising from tax aggressive activities to extract rent from shareholders, particularly those shareholders who sold their shares to the managers. Our findings are particularly important in light of the number of studies relying on the agency view of tax avoidance to develop arguments or to draw inferences.

Extant research suggests that conditional conservatism reduces information asymmetry between a firm and its shareholders as well as its debtholders. However, there is little evidence on whether conditional conservatism reduces information asymmetry differentially for shareholders and debtholders. We use the setting of a firm's choice between equity versus debt when it seeks a significant amount of external financing to examine this research question. We find that when firms raise a significant amount of external financing, the use of equity (versus debt) increases with the level of conservatism. We also find that the reduction in cost of equity associated with conservatism is greater for equity issuers than for debt issuers, but find no such difference when we examine cost of debt. In addition, we find that the positive effect of conservatism on the choice of equity issuance (versus debt issuance) is accentuated when the information asymmetry between the firm and its shareholders is more severe. Overall, our results suggest that conservatism reduces information asymmetry more between firms and shareholders than between firms and debtholders.

Based on Lambert, Leuz, and Verrecchia's (2007) derivation of the cost of equity capital in terms of expected cash flows, we generate a testable hypothesis that relates tax avoidance to a firm's cost of equity capital. Using three broad measures of tax avoidance—book-tax differences, permanent book-tax differences, and long-run cash effective tax rates—to test our hypothesis, we find that the cost of equity is lower for tax-avoiding firms. This effect is stronger for firms with better outside monitoring, firms that likely realize higher marginal benefits from tax savings, and firms with higher information quality. Overall, our results suggest that equity investors generally require a lower expected rate of return due to the positive cash flow effects of corporate tax avoidance.