On IT Control Weaknesses in Auditors’ Reports on Internal Control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By analysing auditors’ SOX 404 reports from 2004 to 2009 we find after 2006 that reporting of information technology control weaknesses (ITWs) decreased significantly, primarily by Big 4 firms. This change appears to reflect Big 4 reporting practices in response to a change in auditing standards rather than the nature of Big 4 clients’ internal control systems, suggesting that SOX 404 auditors’ reports have become less informative. We find associations between ITW reporting and both non-ITW and financial misstatement reporting are moderated by auditor type and time period (2004-2006 vs. 20072009). Based on frequency of reporting, the relative ordering of individual ITWs, while differing over time, is similar over auditor type, company size and industry. We identify a small number of non-ITWs in SOX 404 reporting that may hold practical implications for an auditor’s consideration of IT control testing and an educator’s teaching of IT and non-IT controls.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".