CEOs' Reports about Internal Control: A Content Analysis

This article is about internal control as perceived by CEOs of French firms listed in the CAC 40 index. While the American regulator recommends COSO, French law prescribes no particular framework for the required report. Thus, management has more freedom, which should lead to more diversity of the content, and therefore more richness for lexical content analysis. The latter certainly confirms some trends identified by previous works (e.g. the importance of the risk topic and the financial dimension), but it also shows the shareholder-oriented notion of internal reports. Such a work, based on disclosures published in 2005, should extend former surveys and prefigure further researches.