New internal control reporting (ICR) requirements under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) imposed affirmative duties on managers and auditors to evaluate and attest to the effectiveness of internal controls. This paper studies the role of ICR regulation in alleviating accounting manipulation....

The joint provision of audit and non-audit services by audit firms to their audit clients has posed a threat to auditor independence. To mitigate the independence problem, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a regulation (SEC 2003) that prohibits audit partners from...