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theses

This dissertation comprises three essays that examine factors that influence the economic effects of accounting information. The first essay studies auditor reliance on continuous auditing tools by providing a reliance framework and including two case studies from multinational firms. Businesses continuously enhance their processes via their systems to achieve targets more efficiently and effectively. Investments in business IT systems, such as ERP and data analytics, facilitate the production of real-time financial information and sophisticated internal controls to monitor them. By contrast, the external auditing processes have not witnessed a similar development (AICPA 2012). Even though there are no auditing standards that preclude leveraging automated audit tools, the approaches and techniques used in current external audits are considered relatively outdated (AICPA 2012; Alles 2015; Manson, McCartney, and Sherer 1997). The cases and discussion highlight the probable barriers to realizing the full potential of technology in an audit environment and propose ways to move the profession forward.
The second essay is concerned with corruption and anti-corruption measures. Corruption negatively effects political, economic, social, and environmental aspects of society (Transparency International 2008). To counter corruption, various researchers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) propose measures like transparency, accountability, and integrity. Nonetheless, the literature is not clear on the effect of these measures on corruption and the relationships among them. This study attempts to address this gap empirically by analyzing a unique dataset from Kuwait, a resource-rich developing country, via structural equation modelling. The results show that although transparency is an important factor in mitigating corruption, it does not directly affect it. Rather, transparency has a strong and significant effect on accountability, and accountability affects integrity, which ultimately explains corruption. This result shows that transparency initiatives should not be an end in themselves, but rather part of an effort that includes a push for accountability measures and a culture of integrity in the workplace.
The third essay studies the determinants of internal control weaknesses in information technology, software, security, and access. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have proved to be essential for the operation of modern firms. Not only do ERPs improve the operation of firms, but they also significantly improve their internal controls as well (Morris 2011). Nonetheless, internal control weaknesses vary in kind and severity and ERPs do not mitigate them all. Internal control weaknesses related to information technology, software, security, and access (hereafter, ICW-IT) are an example of weaknesses that ERPs may not effectively mitigate. Previous papers have studied the effect of ERP systems on internal controls and find that there is no significant difference in ICW-IT among ERP and non-ERP adopters. Due to the importance of ICW-IT and the significance of ERP systems, this paper investigates the determinants of ICW-IT within ERP firms. The results of the study show that firms with ICW-IT are more complex, have smaller audit firms, have more organizational changes, and are smaller in size.

ETD_9181

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Ahmad AlQassar

doi:10.7282/t3-pxk0-2k97

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.