불성실공시지정 및 부과벌점이 내부회계관리제도 검토의견과 감사의견에 미치는 영향

The external auditors express an opinion as to the effectiveness of a company's internal controls and financial statements based on historical information provided by company. Auditors' opinion plays a role informing outside investors of firm’s true value with public confidence, by reducing information asymmetry between management and outside investors. Therefore auditor should use all the information available for expressing an audit opinion and internal control opinion to minimize damages that investors and creditors may have due to information asymmetry. Green Paper published by European Union supports this argument. According to Green Paper, the auditors should consider information available comprehensively for audit service since they have the exclusive authority to access various levels of fundamental information of company including not only historical information but also forward looking information. In addition, Green Paper reports that the auditors should expand their horizon on considering information that add real value to the stakeholders. Therefore, auditor should review disclosure quality of client to confirm the soundness of business environment and the appropriateness of financial information in accordance with forward looking criteria which banking institution uses for loan decision making. Similarly, auditors are likely to audit client with unfaithful disclosure and high accumulated penalty points more carefully. In other words, auditors should extend their view on covering the quality of various disclosures in general from traditional view focusing only regular disclosures like financial statements. Especially, since firms with high accumulated penalty points are likely to be delisted from stock market in near future, we predict auditors express qualified audit and internal control opinion to the firm with high accumu lated penalty points. The empirical results show that both unfaithful disclosure corporation and the firm with higher accumulated penalty points receive more qualified internal control opinion than normal firms. Also both unfaithful disclosure corporation and the firm with higher accumulated penalty points receive more qualified audit opinion as well. Additional test using unfaithful disclosure corporations sample only reveals similar result as result of main analysis. The result of this paper shows that external auditors acknowledge the importance of client’s status in stock market; whether client is designated as an unfaithful disclosure corporation and the level of penalty points imposed on such client. This paper is meaningful in a number of ways. First, we examine that auditors in Korea extend their roles as Green Paper insists to express an opinion by considering the quality of disclosures. Second, unlike prior literatures which used only whether firm is designated as unfaithful disclosure corporations or not as proxy for disclosure quality, this paper adds the accumulated penalty points to examine the activeness of auditors on distinguishing the information quality. Therefore this paper gives contributions by providing the implications for future study about quantitative evaluation benchmark by using accumulated penalty points.