Audit process, private information, and insider trading
研究发现，企业高管和独立董事在审计报告日前后异常增加交易，尤其是那些随后收到修改意见或重述财务结果的公司，这些交易帮助避免了重大损失，表明审计过程可能被内幕人士利用进行机会主义交易。
Abstract While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate insiders. We focus our analysis on insider trading around the audit report date. We find an increase in trading around the audit report date and that the increase is abnormally large for firms that subsequently report modified opinions. The abnormal increase in trading is concentrated among officers and non-audit committee independent directors, and most pronounced in first-time modified opinions and modified opinions in years where financial results are subsequently restated. These trades are highly opportunistic: they predict restatements, and as a consequence, we show they avoid significant losses. Collectively, our findings provide novel evidence that insiders appear to exploit private information about the audit process––a process ostensibly designed to protect shareholders––for opportunistic gain.