기업지배구조가 내부회계관리 담당인력 숫자에 미치는 영향

Prior studies show that firms with strong corporate governance mechanisms are less likely to have internal control weaknesses. Choi et al. (2010) report that the ratio of the IC personnel in a firm is negatively associated with the probability of internal control weaknesses and positively associated with financial reporting quality. This suggests that firms with stronger corporate governance mechanisms are more interested in effective internal control and are likely to hire a higher number of IC personnel. This paper empirically investigates this hypothesis. The empirical evidence using 4,475 firm-year observations that are listed in Korea Stock Exchange or Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotations for the period from year 2005 to 2008 partially supports the hypothesis. At the firm-level, firms with larger board size and firms that have an audit committee are likely to have more IC personnel. We do not find a significant relationship between IC personnel and controlling shareholder ownership, foreign shareholder ownership, and board independence. The results are similar when we measure IC personnel as a proportion of the accounting, finance, and information technology and system departments. The findings are robust to controlling for firm size, number of employees, profitability, solvency, and growth. For a subsample of firms with audit committees, we investigate the relation between audit committee characteristics and the number of IC personnel and fail to find consistently significant association. We only find that the level of independence of audit committee members is associated with the number of IC personnel in finance and information technology and system departments.