Business Commons^™

We report results of a field study of the process by which a Canadian publicly-traded company and prospective auditors acquire information about each other and enter an engagement. We obtained documents from the company (including a request for proposal and minutes of audit committee meetings) and bids submitted by audit firms. We also interviewed senior company officers and all prospective audit partners to learn what each party wanted to know about the other, and how they obtained the information they sought. We observed: (1) the audit committee was involved in the process, but management effectively controlled the selection of the …

Two key assumptions underlying the regulation of U.S. financial reporting are the need to mandate the certification of financial statements, and to require that this certification be performed by independent auditors. Private incentives to demand (and supply) certification are thought to be insufficient, and independence is thought to be necessary for quality audit. In this study, we collect archival data on certification activity in the economy, and conduct a field experiment on an unregulated online market for certification of baseball cards to investigate the validity of these assumptions. Our results show that: (1) Private markets for certification services are ubiquitous …