Auditor Litigation Risk and Corporate Disclosure of Quarterly Review Report
44 Pages Posted: 17 Oct 2005 Last revised: 23 Feb 2009
Date Written: March 1, 2005
Abstract
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently made timely reviews of quarterly financial statements mandatory for all registrants. The objective is to improve corporate quarterly reporting. However, formal review reports are not required to be included in 10-Q filings, and may not even be issued by auditors. A priori, one would expect these reports to be useful to investors if they imply added auditor diligence or if they contain modifications to the standard report. We find that only 5.7% of the companies in our sample attached the auditor's review report in their 10-Q filings. Also the majority of these reports are clean, suggesting that clients may not be disclosing the reports when they are modified. After controlling for factors such as auditor type, agency costs, capital market transactions, and company size, we find a significant negative association between auditor's litigation risk and disclosure of a review report. In addition, we find that the disclosure of a review report is associated with auditor type and company size.
Keywords: Voluntary Disclosure, Review Reports, Litigation Risk
JEL Classification: G38, M41, M45, M49
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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