The Empirical Study On The Voluntary Disclosure Motivation Of Internal Control Attestation Report

In recent years, numbers of listed companies at home and abroad have exposed financial frauds, and these events make the regulatory authorities of the nation pay more attention to the effectiveness and information disclosure of internal control of listed companies. In order to enhance investors’confidence in capital markets, the United States promulgated and implemented Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was hailed as "the most severe Bill in the history of the United States". The implementation of the bill marks the United States officially entered the stage of mandatory disclosure for the disclosure of internal control information. And then a series of related policies and regulations were introduced in China, especially, the Internal Control Application Guidelines which was released in2010made the disclosure of internal control information become an important focus of regulatory authorities.Under the background in the system, the article studies the motivation of the listed companies for voluntary disclosure of the internal control attestation report, from2009to2011. Begin with principal-agent theory, asymmetric information theory, signal transmission theory and stakeholder theory; the article elaborated the theory of internal control information disclosure. Finally, we got the hypothesis and appropriate variables and then make the empirical analysis. Studies have shown that the motivation of listed companies disclosure their internal control information is reduce the cost of refinancing, reduce agency costs and p revent "adverse selection". The scale of assets of listed companies, listed years as well as asset-liability ratio have a more significant impact on listed companies to disclose their internal control attestation report.China is in a transition period from the voluntary disclosure to the mandatory disclosure. This article summarizes the relevant research results in the field of information disclosure of internal control, such as the impact factors, the effectiveness and market reaction of internal control information disclosure. Besides, this paper combed the course of development of internal control framework defined by the COSO Commission, from which we can take a more comprehensive and intuitive understanding of the development of the internal control framework and policies evolution.