Accounting Organizations and Society最新文献

Examining the implementation of ISA 700 (UK and Ireland) provides unique insights into auditors’ word choice and tone when creating expanded audit reports. Focusing on the first two years of ISA 700 implementation, I evaluate readability and tone to determine if ISA 700 audit reports are associated with greater reading ease and increased risk discussion. I find that ISA 700 audit reports are easier to read and better reflect the risk-related nature of the audit. Results show that improvements are concentrated in the initial year of implementation. Additionally, audit reports include more general versus discipline-specific terms noted in management-developed communications. Using an information readability metric, I find that post-ISA 700 audit reports are readable even when more risks are disclosed. Overall, these results show that expanded audit reports can be crafted in a manner that is easier to understand while communicating the underlying risks in a financial statement audit.

The unprecedented contagion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, causative of COVID-19, has spawned watershed economic, social, ethical, and political upheaval—catalyzing severe polarization among the global populace. Ostensibly, to demonstrate the most appropriate path towards responding to the virus outbreak, public officials in the United States (“U.S.”), representing both Democratic and Republican parties, stand accused of unduly influencing COVID-19 records in their respective jurisdictions. This study investigates the role political partisanship may have played in decreasing the accuracy of publicly reported COVID-19 data in the U.S. Leveraging social identity theory, we contend that public officials may have manipulated the reporting records in accounting for COVID-19 infection cases and deaths to validate the effectiveness of political party objectives. We employ Benford's Law to assess misreporting and evaluate the integrity of county-level COVID-19 reporting data through the construction of four distinct political party classifications. Specifically, we cross the county voting majority for the 2016 presidential candidate for each U.S. state (Democratic and Republican) with the 2020 gubernatorial political party (Democratic and Republican) in which each county resides. For the sample period of January 21, 2020 through November 3, 2020 (Election Day), the study's results suggest that the reported COVID-19 infection cases and deaths in the U.S. violate Benford's Law in a manner consistent with underreporting. Our analysis reveals that Democratic counties demonstrate the smallest departures from Benford's Law while Republican counties demonstrate the greatest departures.

We investigate the effect of managers' rank & file employee coordination costs on real activities manipulation (RAM). We identify exogenous variation in managers' rank & file employee coordination costs using the adoption of 99 wrongful dismissal laws across 47 U.S. states between 1970 and 1999. We first find that RAM declines when managers' rank & file employee coordination costs increase. We further document that managers’ rank & file employee coordination costs reduce decentralized RAM but affect neither centralized RAM nor centralized accrual-based earnings management, both of which are less likely to require rank & file employee coordination. Event-time tests corroborate and document the validity of the parallel trends assumption in our setting. Cross-sectional tests document predictable variation in our main result across firms and over time. Consistent with rank & file employee coordination costs constraining RAM, managers miss earnings thresholds more often after rank & file employee coordination costs increase. Our nuanced inferences inform the literature investigating factors that constrain RAM and the extent to which rank & file employees determine firm outcomes.

This paper studies the identity transitions of East German audit recruits during the fundamental ideological, economic, and societal change brought about by the reunification of Germany in 1990. Integrating the identity work literature with key concepts from Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman, we build on semi-structured interviews with two groups of recruits—university graduates and former state auditors—to explore and theorize the marked differences observed in these recruits' transition processes. In line with wider processes of territorial stigmatization, we argue that the West German audit firms pragmatically instrumentalized their local personnel, seeking to deploy them without intending to integrate them into the profession. In turn, the audit recruits met with this exertion of symbolic violence by managing a ‘spoiled identity’. The university graduates found it easier to recognize and accumulate legitimate forms of capital, thereby submitting themselves to the inculcation of the profession's socialization process, which ultimately yielded their institution into the profession. In contrast, the former state auditors' local knowledge and access to client networks provided immediately useful capital to the West German firms, which, however, sought to retain a status differential vis-à-vis these recruits. As a result of such strategies of condescension, the former state auditors maintained key aspects of their identity as a salient part of their self-conception. We further highlight the role of the local audit offices in the recruits' transition processes, as they evolved from flexible spaces, which allowed for experimentation and improvisation, into more structured units. This process embedded professional values and practices, thereby creating localized office identities.

We examine whether combinations of trust-centric controls promote knowledge sharing behavior, and, in turn, team performance. Using multi-source data from 138 business unit management teams (534 total respondents), we find that in-team clan control and in-team monitoring are positively associated with team performance via knowledge sharing, while the relative emphasis on team-based incentives is not. We also find that team-based incentives and in-team clan control are substitutes, while in-team monitoring complements both team-based incentives and in-team clan control. These results show that trust-centric controls can encourage knowledge sharing; moreover, in-team monitoring is important to getting the most benefit from using team-based incentives or in-team clan control. However, firms can make substitution choices between in-team clan control and team-based incentives as they both encourage a shared purpose.

Motivated by ongoing dialog at the national level on racial (in)equality, we examine the relations between audit partner ethnicity (audit partners of Asian, Black, or Hispanic origin) and three salient audit phenomena. Specifically, we examine whether there is a difference in financial reporting quality between the clients of ethnic minority audit partners (EMAPs, hereafter) and those of White partners, whether EMAPs face a different work environment than their White counterparts, and how EMAPs are treated in the audit firm. We find that clients of EMAPs, on average, have earnings that are more predictive of future cash flows, have smaller unsigned discretionary accruals, and are less likely to receive a comment letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission than clients of White partners. We also find weak evidence that clients of EMAPs have more persistent earnings, lower signed discretionary accruals, and higher audit fees. We do not find evidence of differences in restatement likelihood between the clients of EMAPs and those of White partners. Overall, these results provide some evidence that clients of EMAPs have higher financial reporting quality. Next, we find that, compared to White partners, EMAPs are more likely to work in offices that are smaller, earn lower audit fees, are non-Big 4, and have no prestigious clients. Finally, we find that EMAPs are more likely to be in charge of engagements with clients whose top management (but not whose audit committee) has ethnic representation. We find no evidence that EMAPs are less likely to be engaged with prestigious or important clients. However, we find that, following a financial restatement, EMAPs are more likely than White audit partners to be replaced. Collectively, our findings suggest that even though EMAPs 1) tend to work in less desirable offices, 2) have a client alignment that is affected by ethnic representation in the client's top management, 3) face more severe consequences after audit failure, they are associated with some properties of higher audit quality. This study is one of the first to broadly examine important aspects of the work of EMAPs. We believe that our findings will be of interest to audit firms, audit clients, other related parties, and society at large, especially given audit firms' efforts to improve ethnic diversity.

We investigate how emotion-understanding ability, a component of emotional intelligence, and tournament incentives jointly influence supervisors' propensity to acquire information about their subordinates' trustworthiness and tailor their control decisions to this information. We predict and find that when receiving piece-rate incentives, high emotion-understanding supervisors are more likely than low emotion-understanding supervisors to acquire subordinate-type information and use it in their control decisions. In addition, relative to piece-rate incentives, tournament incentives increase supervisors’ propensity to acquire subordinate-type information more for low emotion-understanding supervisors than high emotion-understanding supervisors. Taken together, our results suggest that hiring high emotion-understanding supervisors and giving supervisors tournament incentives are at least partial substitutes in motivating supervisors to acquire and, thus, use subordinate-type information in their control decisions. Our results offer important insights into the process through which supervisors make discretionary control decisions and contribute to the understanding of the forces that shape managerial controls within organizations.

The integration of acquisitions is often complicated by cultural differences between the acquiring and acquired firms. An important path through which cultural differences can impact acquisition performance is through employee resistance. We assemble detailed survey data to examine how acquiring firms' use of integration controls moderates the impact of employee resistance following from cultural differences on acquisition performance. Our findings confirm that cultural differences between acquirer and target are associated with initial employee resistance, which in turn depresses acquisition performance. Managers’ use of integration controls moderates the effects of employee resistance on acquisition performance. Specifically, while use of task integration controls is positively associated with performance, it also amplifies the detrimental effects of resistance. In contrast, use of sociocultural integration controls helps to reduce these effects. Our findings thus indicate that in the presence of cultural differences, sociocultural integration gains importance to reduce initial employee resistance, which can enhance the effectiveness of subsequent task integration efforts.