The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 places significant and costly new burdens on public companies. Meeting the recurring requirements for financial reporting under SOX effectively will demand innovative application of information technology. The Continuous Auditing Web Services model (CAWS) provides a framework for considering how to efficiently manage and automate financial reporting. We prop...

Over the past few years, cases of miserable failure in corporate governance have shocked the financial world. Enron and WorldCom are just two examples of how a few people in a position of power can cause unprecedented damage to hundreds of thousands of people, including investors, employees, and retirees. Lessons thus learned created a wave of regulations, the most significant being the Sarba...

B usinesses today rely on the work being done by staff using personal computers. The proliferation of personal computers has led to widespread implementation of end-user computing applications. As their name implies, end-user applications are designed, implemented, and controlled by users rather than by IT professionals. End-user applications can be risky for organizations, both with respect to...

Corporate accounting failures and regulatory proceedings that led to the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 increased the scrutiny of auditors. We investigate whether these events resulted in a change in auditor behavior with respect to going concern reporting. Generally speaking, we find that non-Big N auditors became more conservative while Big N auditors became more accurate. Specif...

The fallout of the Enron debacle spurred legislative and regulatory activity aimed at strengthening corporate governance and preventing another corporate implosion. Confronting shattered investor confidence, Congress responded to these corporate governance fiascos by enacting the now infamous Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), meanwhile, called on the self...

We address a text regression problem: given a piece of text, predict a real-world continuous quantity associated with the text’s meaning. In this work, the text is an SEC-mandated financial report published annually by a publiclytraded company, and the quantity to be predicted is volatility of stock returns, an empirical measure of financial risk. We apply wellknown regression techniques to a l...

everal sections of the Sarbanes– Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) directly affect the governance of the information technology (IT) organization, including potential SOX certification by the chief information officer, Section 404 internal control assessments, “rapid and current” disclosures to the public of material changes, and authentic and immutable record retention. The Securities and Exchange Commi...

This study empirically tests the hypothesis that perceptions of the board’s alignment with shareholder interests are reflected in the financial performance of firms. The hypothesis is tested by examining the relationship between operating earnings in excess of the cost of capital (ER) and firm grades based on a new index of shareholder confidence based on: individual potential, group potential ...