내부회계관리 운영인력의 특성이 이익의 질에 미치는 영향

Abstract

Such large-scale accounting frauds as Enron and WorldCom in the early 2000s revealed the limitations of supervision by external audit and increased the demand that a corporation should set up its own supervision function. In the United States, Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 to reinforce the responsibilities of the manager and external auditor for internal control. In South Korea, Act on External Audit of Stock Companies was revised in December, 2003 and led to the implementation of the internal accounting control system in the fiscal year starting on January 1, 2004. In June, 2005, the steering committee of the internal accounting control system under Korea Listed Companies Association established the “model criteria for the internal accounting control system,” demanding that the board of directors and auditors should set up and run an internal accounting control system and asking external auditors to attach a review report on the operational state of the internal accounting control system to the audit report. As a type of internal control system to effectively control corporate management activities, the internal accounting control system concerns a corporation’s financial report process. That is, its goal is to have corporations write and announce reliable accounting information by checking and adjusting accounting information regularly in order to control its error and wrongdoing for themselves (Lee Ho-yeong et al., 2011). This study set out to empirically analyze the effectiveness of the internal accounting control system and examine whether the system, which was introduced to increase the reliability of accounting information, would fulfill its purpose by considering the characteristics of the operational personnel. In other words, it analyzed the effects of the size (number), mean career (months), and certified public accountant certificate of the personnel in charge of internal accounting control on the quality of accounting information or that of profit. The quality of accounting profit was measured with real earning management by Roychowdhury (2006). The study results will contribute to the examination of institutional supplementation to run the internal accounting control system more effectively by investigating the personnel characteristics to influence the effectiveness of the internal accounting control system. Empirical analysis covered data from 2005 to recent 2010 over a period of six years for which data on the operational personnel of internal accounting control were obtainable. The final sample included 2,100 companies listed in the stock market, settled accounts at the end of December, and did not operate in the finance sector. The interested variables were size and professionalism related to the personnel characteristics of the internal accounting control system. They were specifically the size, mean career, and certified public accountant certificate of the operational personnel. The control variables influencing the quality of profit include corporate size, debt ratio, return on assets, Big 4, the largest shareholders’ ownership, and industry and year dummy. The dependent variable was the measurement of real earning management by Roychowdhury (2006). The empirical analysis results show that there were significant negative relations between the size of the personnel in charge of internal accounting control and real earning management, which indicates that as there are more staffs in charge of internal accounting control, the corporation manages internal accounting control better and thus decreases in earning management and increases in quality of profit. In addition, real earning management also had significant negative relations with the mean career of internal accounting personnel, which can measure the degree of professionalism based on field experiences, and certified public accountant certificate, which tells whether they have professionalism about accounting knowledge. When the personnel of internal accounting control has professionalism about accounting, earning management is restricted and the quality of accounting information improves. Those findings point to the importance of investment into human resources by corporations in order for the internal accounting control system to have effectiveness. In other words, the increased size of internal accounting control personnel reflects extended investments into the comprehensive aspects of corporate activities to deal with internal control issues. The study results will make a contribution by analyzing the effects of the personnel characteristics of the internal accounting control system on quality of profit. Information about the personnel of the internal accounting control system is unique information only announced in South Korea in the entire world. It is probably because the information is useful for estimating the effectiveness of the system as demonstrated in the study results.