IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/bushor/v53yi5p511-522.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

From clear to complicated: Buying and selling accounting services post Sarbanes-Oxley

Author

Listed:
  • Jelinek, Ronald
  • Jelinek, Kate

Abstract

While much has been said and written about the effect of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), one consequence of the new regulation that has been largely neglected is the law's dramatic impact on how audits are bought and sold in the United States. Prior to SOX, the process was clear and simple: accounting firm partners would meet with the publicly held client company's C-level executives to complete the exchange. When SOX was passed, Congress took the buying decision out of the hands of the client company's executives and placed it in the hands of the company's external audit committee. As this inter-disciplinary research will explain, this change--and other similar changes emanating from the "independence" provisions in SOX--has forever complicated the client-auditor exchange. Based on the literature in business-to-business selling, this research proposes two models--one centered around the concept of a "buying center" and another around "selling team" theory--in an effort to advance thinking in this area, and help both client companies and accounting firms operate in this new environment.

Suggested Citation

  • Jelinek, Ronald & Jelinek, Kate, 2010. "From clear to complicated: Buying and selling accounting services post Sarbanes-Oxley," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 53(5), pages 511-522, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:53:y::i:5:p:511-522
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007-6813(10)00064-9
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Watts, Ross L & Zimmerman, Jerold L, 1983. "Agency Problems, Auditing, and the Theory of the Firm: Some Evidence," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(3), pages 613-633, October.
    2. Asare, Stephen & Cohen, Jeffrey & Trompeter, Greg, 2005. "The effect of non-audit services on client risk, acceptance and staffing decisions," Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 489-520.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jelinek, Ronald, 2021. "Loyalty or lethargy? Keeping sellers committed, not entrenched," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 64(1), pages 61-71.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maroun, Warren & Atkins, Jill, 2014. "Section 45 of the Auditing Profession Act: Blowing the whistle for audit quality?," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 248-263.
    2. Lamar Pierce & Jason Snyder, 2015. "Unethical Demand and Employee Turnover," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 131(4), pages 853-869, November.
    3. Abdullah, Azrul Bin, 2018. "Company-specific characteristics and the choice of hedge accounting for derivatives reporting: Malaysian case," SocArXiv npa6v, Center for Open Science.
    4. Steve Fortin & Ahmad Hammami & Michel Magnan, 2021. "Re‐exploring Fair Value Accounting and Value Relevance: An Examination of Underlying Securities," Abacus, Accounting Foundation, University of Sydney, vol. 57(2), pages 220-250, June.
    5. Kausar, Asad & Shroff, Nemit & White, Hal, 2016. "Real effects of the audit choice," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 157-181.
    6. Andy Lardon & Marc Deloof, 2014. "Financial disclosure by SMEs listed on a semi-regulated market: evidence from the Euronext Free Market," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 361-385, February.
    7. Gus De Franco & Yuyan Guan & Yibin Zhou & Xindong Zhu, 2024. "The Impact of Credit Market Development on Auditor Choice: Evidence from Banking Deregulation," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(2), pages 589-634, May.
    8. J. Toms, 2001. "Information content of earnings in an unregulated market: the co-operative cotton mills of Lancashire, 1880–1900," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(3), pages 175-190.
    9. Persakis, Anthony & Iatridis, George Emmanuel, 2016. "Audit quality, investor protection and earnings management during the financial crisis of 2008: An international perspective," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 73-101.
    10. Ray Ball, 2009. "Market and Political/Regulatory Perspectives on the Recent Accounting Scandals," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 277-323, May.
    11. Chang, Hsihui & Choy, Hiu Lam & Cooper, William W. & Ruefli, Timothy W., 2009. "Using Malmquist Indexes to measure changes in the productivity and efficiency of US accounting firms before and after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 37(5), pages 951-960, October.
    12. Arrunada, Benito & Paz-Ares, Candido, 1997. "Mandatory rotation of company auditors: A critical examination," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 31-61, March.
    13. Kharuddin, Khairul Ayuni Mohd & Basioudis, Ilias G & Farooque, Omar Al, 2021. "Effects of the Big 4 national and city-level industry expertise on audit quality in the United Kingdom," Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, Elsevier, vol. 43(C).
    14. Iwasaki, Ichiro & 岩﨑, 一郎, 2013. "What Determines Audit Independence and Expertise in Russia? Firm-Level Evidence," RRC Working Paper Series 27_v2, Russian Research Center, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    15. Sánchez-Ballesta, Juan Pedro & Lloréns, Mercedes Bernal, 2010. "Monitoring, reputation and accountability in issuing banks in mid-nineteenth-century Spain," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 47(4), pages 403-419, October.
    16. Colleen Honigsberg, 2019. "Hedge Fund Regulation and Fund Governance: Evidence on the Effects of Mandatory Disclosure Rules," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(4), pages 845-888, September.
    17. Hautcoeur, Pierre-Cyrille, 2004. "Efficiency, competition, and the development of life insurance in France (1870-1939): Or: should we trust pension funds?," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 205-232, July.
    18. Ping Yung & Lawrence W C Lai, 2009. "Quality Assurance in Construction by Independent Experts: A Case Study of the Efficiency Performance of State-Owned Enterprises in China," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 36(4), pages 682-697, August.
    19. Ronald A. Dye, 2010. "Disclosure “Bunching”," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(3), pages 489-530, June.
    20. Ibrahim, Awad Elsayed Awad & Hussainey, Khaled & Nawaz, Tasawar & Ntim, Collins & Elamer, Ahmed, 2022. "A systematic literature review on risk disclosure research: State-of-the-art and future research agenda," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:53:y::i:5:p:511-522. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.