Inexperienced Component Auditors and the Internal Information Asymmetry of Multinational Corporations

Abstract

With the global expansion of business operations, many U.S. corporations now operate internationally. While these multinational corporations (MNCs) rely on information about their operations to allocate resources, this information is likely dispersed within the firm, leading to internal information asymmetry between top executives and divisional managers. Meanwhile, audits of these geographically dispersed MNCs are challenging, and parts of these audits are sometimes outsourced to local foreign auditors who have no experience serving as opinion-issuing auditors for U.S. issuers (“inexperienced component auditors”). In this article, we examine whether involving such inexperienced component auditors is associated with MNCs’ internal information environment. We find that, relative to a matched control sample, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issuers with the participation of inexperienced component auditors have higher internal information asymmetry and lower internal capital allocation efficiency. Our results suggest that audit quality matters not only to a firm’s external financial statement users but also to its internal users.