内部控制的爆炸...doc

The Internal Control Explosion
Steven Maijoor
Maastricht Accounting and Auditing Research and Education Center
(MARC), Universiteit Maastricht, herlands
Abstract
The central theme in Power’s 1997 book on the audit society is the proliferation of audit activity within the United Kingdom (UK) and North America. The most important joint development with the audit explosion is the rise of internal control systems. Auditing has shifted from auditing es to auditing systems, and internal controls have e the subject of public policy debates on the regulation of corporate governance and the regulation of auditing. Power states that there is much confusion in practice about what (effective) internal controls actually are. This paper makes a similar argument with respect to internal control research. Internal controls are studied in various areas of accounting research, covering very different concepts, and studying controls at anizational levels. As a result, the cross-fertilization between the various types of internal control research is limited. Also, most internal control research in accounting is not conducted within the context of wider corporate governance issues. Hence, many claims about the value of internal control systems for corporate governance still need to be studied.
Key words: agency theory; corporate governance; external auditing; internal audit; internal control systems; management control.
SUMMARY
The central theme in Power’s 1997 book on the audit society is the proliferation of audit activity within the United Kingdom (UK) and North America. The most important joint development with the audit explosion is the rise of internal control systems. As a result of the explosion of internal control systems, auditing has shifted from auditing es to auditing systems, and internal controls have e the subject of public policy debates on the regulation of corporate governance and the regulation of auditing. For example, in the recent debates on the formation