Appearances Are Important: Outsourced Internal Audit Services and the Perception of Auditor Independence

The appearance of independence is an important facet of the regulation of auditor independence. The authors conducted a research study to gauge how some financial statement users—loan officers—view and make decisions based on loan proposals that present various types of relationships between the applicant, the auditor that performs the external audit, and the auditor that performs the internal audit function (whether performed in-house or outsourced to the hypothetical loan applicant\u27s external auditor). The results are insightful: The closer the relationship between the external auditor and the audit client, the higher the perception of inappropriateness, and the less likely the loan officer is to approve the application. The findings support the current direction of discussion about auditor independence rules, and the authors draw thoughtful conclusions about their study\u27s wider implications

Judges' Attitudes toward the Public Accounting Profession

This paper presents the results of two related studies. In Study One we examine US judges' attitudes toward the public accounting profession and the extent to which those attitudes have changed over three distinct periods of time: (a) early in the decade of the 1990s, (b) late in the decade of the 1990s, but before the Enron and subsequent corporate debacles, and (c) three years after the Enron debacle. We anticipate that attitudes of judges toward the public accounting profession will be relatively stable over time, but nonetheless subject to change if given a substantial stimulus. In Study Two we compare the most current judges' attitudes with those of law students, MBA students and auditors. In total, we find that judges' attitudes are significantly (1) more negative towards the profession in the most recent survey, (2) equivalent to attitudes exhibited by law students and MBA students, and (3) divergent from attitudes of practicing auditors. Conclusions and future research are also discussed.

An Examination of the Association Between Gender and Reporting Intentions for Fraudulent Financial Reporting

whistleblowing, gender, fraudulentreporting, anonymous reporting channel, non-anonymous reporting channel,