Audit committees evaluate financial reporting quality as part of their corporate oversight responsibilities. Given this responsibility, the national stock exchanges now require all audit committee members to be financially literate and at least one member to have financial expertise. In light of recent debates over this requirement, we provide evidence on how experts and literates differ in their evaluations of financial reporting quality. Results suggest that experts' evaluations of financial reporting quality are more strongly associated with their assessments of characteristics underlying reporting quality (e.g., relevance) espoused in Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts No. 2's framework than literates' evaluations. Additionally, literates are more likely than experts to identify concerns about reporting treatments for business activities that are prominent in the business press or are distinguished by their nonrecurring nature, while experts are more likely to raise concerns about reporting treatments for less prominent, recurring activities. This same pattern occurs in the ratings of the quality of the reporting treatments for specific financial statement items with respect to elements underlying reporting quality (e.g., neutrality); literates (experts) assess the quality elements for the reporting treatments of prominent and nonrecurring items (less prominent and recurring items) comparatively lower than experts (literates). These results suggest that including financial experts on audit committees is likely to change the structure and focus of audit committee discussions about financial reporting quality, and may affect the committee's overall assessment of the quality of a company's financial reports.

Business executives and academics frequently criticize budget-based compensation plans as providing incentives for subordinates to build slack into proposed budgets. In this paper, we examine whether either of two practices—using budgets to allocate scarce resources, or providing information about co-workers—reduces budget slack and increases subordinate performance when organizations use budgets for performance evaluation. The results from our experiment show that using budgets for both resource allocation and performance evaluation not only eliminates budget slack, but also increases subordinates' effort and task performance. Additionally, we find that an internal reporting system that provides information about subordinates' budgets and performance to their co-workers mitigates budget slack when superiors do not use budgets as a basis for resource allocation. These results highlight the synergies between the planning (resource allocation) and control (performance evaluation) functions of managerial accounting practices such as budgeting. Our results also suggest that by designing the internal information system to reduce information asymmetry among subordinates, the firm can increase subordinates' incentives to provide more accurate budgets.