Robyn Moroney

Internal Audit, Alternative Internal Audit Structures and the Level of Misappropriation of Assets Fraud

In recent years, the importance of good corporate governance has received significant public and regulatory attention. A crucial part of an entitys corporate governance is its internal audit function. At the same time, there has been significant public concern about the level of fraud within organizations. The purpose of this study is to assess whether organizations with an internal audit function are more likely to detect and self-report fraud than those without. In this study, we use a unique self-reported measure of misappropriation of assets fraud for the first time. The fraud data are from the 2004 KPMG Fraud Survey, which reported fraud from 491 organizations in the private and public sector across Australia and New Zealand. The internal audit data are from a separate mail survey sent to the respondents of the KPMG Fraud Survey. We find that organizations with an internal audit function are more likely than those without such a function to detect and self-report fraud. Furthermore, organizations that rely solely on outsourcing for their internal audit function are less likely to detect and self-report fraud than those that undertake at least part of their internal audit function themselves. These findings suggest that internal audit adds value through improving the control and monitoring environment within organizations to detect and self-report fraud. These results also suggest that keeping the internal audit function within the organization is more effective than completely outsourcing that function.

The Effect of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Merger on Auditor Concentration in Australia: A Note

Concerns have been raised about the impact of the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) merger on the structure of and competition in the audit and assurance services market in Australia. The market share of publicly listed companies for audit firms for each industry category pre– and post–merger is examined in this paper to ascertain levels of auditor concentration. Using the approach outlined by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission a decrease in the level of competition is identified. However, when using another generally accepted concentration measure, the Herfindahl Index, the merger is found to not necessarily decrease competition. In fact, for a number of industry sectors a more equitable spread of clients between the main audit firms was achieved.

Auditor performance variation: impact of sub-specialty knowledge differences between industry-specialists

The extant literature has established that industry-specialist auditors gain performance-enhancing industry-specific sub-specialty knowledge (e.g., Solomon, Shields, & Whittington, 1999) via training and on the job experience. This knowledge has been shown to allow specialists to outperform non-specialists on a range of industry-specific tasks. The current study extends this line of research by comparing and contrasting the relative performance gains enjoyed by industry-specialist auditors in two different industry settings, one regulated and the other unregulated. When specializing in regulated industries, auditors gain very detailed industry-specific knowledge which is not the case for specialists in unregulated industries (Dunn & Mayhew, 2004). By comparing industry-specialists to non-specialists with matching industry-based experience, this study measures the relative benefits of specialization in different industry settings, rather than the benefits of specialization per se, which has been well established in the literature. This study finds that the performance gains made by regulated industry-specialists significantly outweigh those made by unregulated industry-specialists on industry-specific tasks. The implications of these results for future research and practice are explored in the body of the chapter.

Public Oversight of Audit Firms: The Slippery-Slope of Enforcing Regulation

This study uses the slippery-slope framework to understand how an oversight regulator’s enforcement style influences audit firms’ compliance actions. Using data from interviews with audit regulators and senior audit partners (including partners responsible for audit quality control) in Australia, we find that audit partners’ perceive that the regulator’s enforcement style has shifted from collaborative to coercive. As the regulator’s enforcement style became more coercive, it inhibited the development of trust and an antagonistic compliance climate emerged. In response, firms mandated strategies to increase the visibility of compliance (e.g., increasing mandatory use of checklists that focus on demonstrating form over substance). The results highlight the importance of a regulator’s enforcement style as a determinant of how audit firms manage inspection risk. An important conclusion is that audit partners are concerned that oversight of the profession is near a tipping point such that there is an increasing risk that continued coercive enforcement could increase compliance but simultaneously reduce audit quality.

The Impact of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Merger on Auditor‐Client Alignment

This paper investigates the impact of the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) merger in Australia on existing and potential clients of the new merged firm. From prior theory it is expected that some existing clients may have an incentive to switch away from a newly merged firm as the same larger firm now audits close competitors once audited by separate firms. Prior theory also suggests that another group of potential clients should be attracted to the newly merged firm where the merger enhances or creates industry specializations. The expectation is that in both of these instances there will be increased switching activity associated with the newly merged audit firm. Contrary to expectations, a significantly lower level of switching behaviour was observed for the newly merged firm compared with that of the other Big 5 firms, suggesting that an advantage of enhanced specialization may not be the attraction of new clients but the retention of existing clients. When comparing the nature of the switches, some support was found for the view that the switches to the new firm were likely to be in enhanced areas of specialization, but no evidence was found to suggest that close competitors would switch away from this firm. The greater rate of retention of clients compared with other Big 5 firms was not associated with a more competitive audit pricing policy.