CAP Forum on Enron: Former Audit Firm Personnel as CFOs: Effect on Earnings Management*
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Corporate hiring of former audit personnel to fill key financial positions is a practice that has attracted attention from the media, the accounting profession, and regulators. The concern is that the former external auditor who now holds a key position with the client may be able to circumvent the audit or exert pressure on the audit team and adversely influence audit quality. We compare a sample of 172 test companies that appointed to the position of chief financial officer (CFO) personnel who are former employees of the companies' auditors, with a control sample of companies that appointed new CFOs who were not affiliated with their auditors. We investigate whether the level of discretionary accruals is greater for the test sample compared with the control sample during the two years following appointment of the CFO. Both univariate and multivariate results for signed discretionary accruals suggest some support for the hypothesis that firms with affiliated CFOs are associated with greater earnings management than firms with unaffiliated CFOs. Furthermore, the results for signed discretionary accruals suggest that the association is stronger for nonpartners who moved from the audit firm to the client with little or no time gap. On average, the results for absolute discretionary accruals do not suggest differences in earnings management between affiliated and unaffiliated CFOs. However, they do indicate some earnings management relative to unaffiliated CFOs by CFOs who had little or no time gap between leaving the audit firm and joining the client firm, although at a weaker level of significance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.007 |
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 it