Inexperienced Component Auditors and the Internal Information Asymmetry of Multinational Corporations
研究发现，聘请缺乏经验的海外当地审计师参与审计的美国跨国公司，其内部信息不对称程度更高，内部资本配置效率更低，表明审计质量不仅影响外部报表使用者，也影响内部管理决策。
With the global expansion of business operations, many U.S. corporations now operate internationally. While these multinational corporations (MNCs) rely on information about their operations to allocate resources, this information is likely dispersed within the firm, leading to internal information asymmetry between top executives and divisional managers. Meanwhile, audits of these geographically dispersed MNCs are challenging, and parts of these audits are sometimes outsourced to local foreign auditors who have no experience serving as opinion-issuing auditors for U.S. issuers (“inexperienced component auditors”). In this article, we examine whether involving such inexperienced component auditors is associated with MNCs’ internal information environment. We find that, relative to a matched control sample, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issuers with the participation of inexperienced component auditors have higher internal information asymmetry and lower internal capital allocation efficiency. Our results suggest that audit quality matters not only to a firm’s external financial statement users but also to its internal users.