Redressing the fundamental conflict of interest in public company audits
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
The goal of various audit industry reforms is to better align the interests of the auditor with external stakeholders. These proposed reforms ignore the fundamental conflict of interest—‘the client’ hires, fires and determines the compensation for the auditor. This problem is fundamental in that ‘the client’ is normally the management or board of the firm who, on occasion, have reason to want to take advantage of the inherent imprecision in accounting for their benefit and subtlety pressure the auditor to achieve this. My evidence‐based proposal takes advantage of the well‐known aversion of managers and boards to government intervention. It incentivizes management and boards to demand rigorous audits by requiring regulatory bodies impose their choice of auditor on public companies that meet well‐specified criteria that indicate poor‐quality reporting (e.g., restatement of financial statements). This proposed reform retains the ‘on average’ benefits that extant research shows the current system of private sector auditing provides while stimulating greater managerial and director self‐interest in high‐quality financial reporting.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it