내부회계관리제도의 도입과 회계정보의 보수성

Abstract

In case of Korea, since the Financial Crisis of 1997, greater transparency in accounting has been required. In September 2001, the internal accounting control system was introduced by the Corporate Restructuring Promotion Law. Since then, the requirement of implementing the internal accounting control system was incorporated into the law governing the corporation's outside audit in December 2003, and effective April 1, 2004, publicly held companies and non-public companies with assets more than 50 billion won became subject to the law. Effective July 2007, companies subject to the law included even those non-public companies with less than 50 billion won, thus widening the coverage of the internal accounting control system. Since the internal accounting control system was put into practice, there has been a debate as to the effectiveness of the system. This is due to the fact that the internal accounting control system and best practice do not take into consideration the company's type of business, size, or uniqueness but is uniformly applied. Furthermore, the best practice only delineate details of the internal accounting control system. In taking the differences between companies into consideration, the best practice may be adopted as a guideline. Accordingly, this paper attempted to verify the efficacy of internal accounting control system by the conservatism of corporate information. The results of the study substantiate Hypothesis 1. "After implementation of the internal accounting control system became mandatory, conservatism will increase in accounting information." The research results indicate that accounting information has become more conservative since 2005 when implementation of the internal accounting control system became mandatory. However, Hypothesis II "After the best practice are put into practice in the internal accounting control system, conservatism will increase in accounting information" was not substantiated. There was no relationship between the changes in conservatism between 2006 when best practice were adopted and 2005 when they were not. This study has made an empirical analysis in determining how the internal accounting control system affects conservatism of accounting information in the initial stage of the system implementation.