Digital Commons Network^™

Issue Brief: Auditing Your Town's Development Code For Barriers To Sustainable Water Management, New England Environmental Finance Center

Sustainable Communities Capacity Building

This issue brief is intended for town officials who want to understand how development regulations in their community affect local water resources. Municipal development codes – the set of regulations that control the built environment – can have a great influence on the availability of clean and healthy water for drinking, recreation, and commercial uses. This in turn affects the community’s social, environmental, and economic vitality.

Comprehensive plans, zoning codes, and building standards are just a few examples of regulations that intentionally or unintentionally regulate the way water is transported, collected and absorbed. Regulations that produce dispersed development or large …

Investor And Client Responses To The First Pcaob Sanction And Part Ii Disclosure Of A Big N Auditor, Leah Elena Muriel

Doctoral Dissertations

I examine investor and client responses to the first PCAOB sanction and the first release of “Part II – Issues Related to Quality Controls” of a Big N auditor. I examine the following: the stock market reaction to the Part II disclosure, investors’ perceptions of earnings quality after both events using the earnings response coefficient (ERC), and client dismissals after the sanction. I find that December year-end clients that operate in highly litigated industries or those with auditor tenure greater than three years are more likely to dismiss Deloitte in the post-sanction period. For the sample of U.S. highly litigated …

Regulation And The Auditing Profession, Alexey Lyubimov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation consists of three studies examining three different regulatory issues that affect the auditing profession. The first study has two main foci. First, the study investigates the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on the Big 4 fee premium. Second, the study investigates the relationship between the size of an audit client and annual fee change. The results show that in the post-SOX environment, clients of non-Big 4 firms have experienced greater increases in audit fees than the clients of the Big 4 firms, resulting in a diminishing Big 4 premium. This is consistent with the notion that non-Big 4 …

The Effects Of Procedural Injustice, Rebecca B. Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to test for the existence of procedural injustice (PIJ) in the audit environment and its effect on junior auditor's reporting of time and level of skeptical action. This dissertation theorizes that the conflicting forces between junior auditors' ethical beliefs, formal firm policies forbidding the underreporting of chargeable time (URT), and implicit encouragement from managers to engage in URT result in a unique aspect of the audit environment, PIJ, because entry-level auditors perceive these conflicting beliefs and messages as unfair. In this study, PIJ is defined as the inverse of procedural justice, which is the …

Local Council Governance And Audit Committees - The Missing Link?, Greg Jones, Graham Bowrey

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose: To examine the level of compliance of NSW Local Government councils with the Internal Audit Guidelines developed and published by the NSW State Government to address the identified weaknesses in the governance structures of the councils. The specific focus in this paper is on a key component of good governance, an audit committee, and whether the NSW Local Government councils have followed the guidelines and established an audit committee. Design / methodology: This paper is based on archival research of the 2009/2010 Annual Reports and websites of NSW Local Government councils to collect data on the existence and structure …