We analyze the potential benefits that firms can realize from implementing technology specifically aimed at monitoring the effectiveness of their internal control systems. The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission asserts that effective internal control monitoring should enhance the efficiency of internal control processes, and in turn, the assurance over such process...

Today’s business environment demands a high degree of compliance of business processes with business rules, policies, regulations and laws. Compliance regulations, such Sarbanes-Oxley force enterprises to continuously review their business processes and service-enabled applications and ensure that they satisfy the set of relevant compliance constraints. Compliance management should be considere...

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...

We document that firms’ management of accounting earnings increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), with a significant increase during the period prior to SOX, followed by a significant decline after passage of SOX. However, the increase in earnings management preceding SOX was primarily in poorly performing industries. We also show that the informativeness...

New generations of governance models referring to either IT or Internal Control – like COBIT [1] and COSO [2] are extended with business perspective willing to gain top management’s ear. But the practice shows, this opening solely is not enough to reach a breakthrough, because models became more complicated than it could be applied without some difficulties. Very frequently exposed, that the be...

Previous literature documents that foreign firms cross-listed in the U.S. Stock Exchanges experience an improvement in the information environment. This paper disputes the idea that cross-listing per se increases the quality of the firm information environment by considering whether this enhancement depends on the effective adoption of stricter rules. As research setting, we use Section 302 of ...

Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in U.S., there has been a general tendency to globally harmonize regulations and practices of board governance. The purpose of this study is to compare among countries how well the board of directors constrains earnings management. Using a sample of firms from 23 countries, we document some evidence that higher outside directorship on the board is associ...

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...

In this paper, we examine whether high-IOS (investment opportunity set) firms vis-à-vis non-growth (low-IOS) will not reduce discretionary expenditures, such as advertising expenses, research and development, SG&A (selling, general administrative) to further sustain the firm growth in a more conservative reporting environment (the post-Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) period). We also investigate, an e...