This paper examines auditor liability rules under imperfect information, costly litigation and risk averse auditors. A negligence rule fails in such a setting, because in equilibrium auditors will deviate with positive probability from any given standard. It is shown that strict liability outperforms negligence with respect to risk allocation, and the probability that a desired level of care is...

essential when representing program states where a memory region (a stack frame or heap cell) may or may not exist. No matter how precise an analysis is, a code auditor may have to deal with a large number of warnings when analyzing large programs. In order to improve the usability of the analyzer, we detail how combining static and dynamic analysis allows an auditor to focus the analyzer on po...

Data Auditor is a system for analyzing data quality via exploring data semantics. Given a user-supplied constraint, such as a functional dependency or an inclusion dependency, the system computes pattern tableaux, which are concise summaries of subsets of the data that satisfy (or fail) the constraint. The engine of Data Auditor is an efficient algorithm for finding these patterns, which defers...

This study examines the demand for audits in a modern voluntary audit setting, in which a number of levels of auditor quality can be chosen. Where audits are not compulsory, a substantial number of organizations choose them. The choice of auditor quality is associated with size, debt and salaries, but not with donations and grants. The results provide support for the audit as a form of monitori...

We examine the relation between firms' debt maturity structures and the propensity to manage earnings. Our results indicate that (i) firms with more current debt are more susceptible to managing earnings, (ii) this relation is stronger for firms facing debt market constraints (those without investment grade debt) and (iii) auditor characteristics such as auditor quality and tenure help diminish...

Several studies have sought to establish the link between the characteristics of a corporation and the audit fees charged by its auditor. Many studies have tried to discover whether auditor specialization affects audit fees. Other research has attempted to discover the effects of government regulation on fees. The impact of risk on audit fees has also been examined, but has proved to be an elus...

Audit fee studies often find large (Big 5) audit firms earn significantly higher fees than small (non-Big 5) firms, but they treat auditor choice as exogenous. In contrast, this paper takes into account that companies are not randomly assigned to audit firms. We find the effects of auditor selection bias on audit fees are statistically and economically significant. Consistent with the predictio...

Advances in technology make it possible for the EDP auditor to work smarter, faster, and deliver added value on every audit. In part this is true because the commoditization of computer hardware means that every auditor can carry a powerful computer everywhere. The software tools that help to realize the productivity potential of the hardware fall broadly into the categories of document managem...