내부회계관리제도 운영실태평가보고서의 중요한 취약점이 부채조달비용에 미치는 영향

Internal Accounting Management Systems (IAMS) have been adopted by firms with the goal of securing financial information reliability. The manager must prepare a reports by the internal control over financial reporting officer on the design, establishment and operation of IAMS and submit it for internal audit (audit committee) and to the board of directors. The auditor must review the propriety of the internal control over financial reporting officer prepared by the manager and its source documents, and express his opinion in a review report. In the US, the auditor audits not only the internal control over financial reporting officer and its source documents but also performs the audit by requesting additional evidence as needed, whereas in Korea the auditor reviews only the manager prepared the internal control over financial reporting officer and source documents. In other words, when a given IAMS is being audited, the auditor can obtain evidence in addition to the materials provided by manager and evaluate whether the IAMS is properly established and operated. In contrast, since a review is done only on the materials provided by manager, if the internal control over financial reporting officer provided by manager is falsely written up, giving a misleading picture of the IAMS establishment and operating conditions, or the source documents provided are inaccurate, the auditor’s capacity to make an accurate assessment is impaired. In Korea, therefore, the use of the auditor’s IAMS review opinion as valuable information must be premised on the accuracy of the internal control over financial reporting officer and source documents. Because of this systemic peculiarity, information in the internal control over financial reporting officer prepared by manager is more important than the review opinion of the auditor expressed in the review report when outside stakeholders make investment decisions related to the firm. Despite this, many prior studies have focused mostly on investigating the usefulness of the auditor’s review report. This study therefore sought to examine the usefulness of the manager prepared the internal control over financial reporting officer from the position of bond market participants, and examined KRX-listed firms from 2006 to 2012 to do the examination. The analysis results are as follows. First, firms reporting material deficiencies in their internal control over financial reporting officer had significantly higher costs of debt than those reporting proper IAMS operation. This indicates a negative reflection on investment decision making by bond market participants who judged the reliability of financial reporting to be comparatively weaker for firms reporting material deficiencies in their internal control over financial reporting officer. Second, compared to firms whose manager and auditors both reported deficiencies in the internal control over financial reporting officer, firms where the internal control over financial reporting officer prepared by manager expressed no deficiencies while the auditor’s review report indicated deficiencies had significantly higher costs of debt. This indicates that outside stakeholders view more negatively the former, as firms whose manager purposefully hides IAMS operation deficiencies, than the latter, as firms in which manager openly admits operational deficiencies from the start. The significance of this study lies in its investigating of the usefulness of the internal control over financial reporting officer in Korea, where the accuracy of this report is more emphasized than in the US.