Managers of organizations establish control systems to reduce the agency costs inherent in those organizations. Control systems include both internal and external control mechanisms, some of which may be viewed as substitutes for each other. We develop a model of the demand for external auditor industry expertise and then examine whether managers substitute such expertise for certain closely related internal control mechanisms in their overall control systems. Using a sample of municipalities, we find evidence that managers who do not hire internal auditors or who hire accounting personnel with low levels of accounting expertise tend to hire external auditors with higher levels of industry expertise. We interpret this to be a conscious trade‐off on the part of the managers, which appears to be linked to the costs of hiring the internal mechanisms in question.
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1 September 2003
Research Article|
September 01 2003
Management Trade‐Offs of Internal Control and External Auditor Expertise
Kevan L. Jensen, Assistant Professor;
Kevan L. Jensen, Assistant Professor
University of Oklahoma.
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Jeff L. Payne, Assistant Professor
Jeff L. Payne, Assistant Professor
University of Oklahoma.
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Online ISSN: 1558-7991
Print ISSN: 0278-0380
American Accounting Association
2003
AUDITING: A Journal of Practice & Theory (2003) 22 (2): 99–119.
Citation
Kevan L. Jensen, Jeff L. Payne; Management Trade‐Offs of Internal Control and External Auditor Expertise. AUDITING: A Journal of Practice & Theory 1 September 2003; 22 (2): 99–119. https://doi.org/10.2308/aud.2003.22.2.99
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