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1、扬州大学本科生毕业论文英文翻译资料学生姓名 杨俊 学号 082403234 专业 会计 班级 会计 0802论文题目 民营中小企业内部控制浅析英文原文：Internal Control Reporting and Accounting ConservatismMary Brooke BillingsNew York UniversityLeslie Davis HodderIndiana University1. Introduction“This law (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) says to shareholders that the financial informat
2、ion you receive from a company will be true and reliable.This law says to workers: we will not tolerate reckless practices that artificially drive up stock prices and eventually destroy the companies, and the pensions, and your jobs.”In 2002, following a series of high-profile cases of corporate imp
3、roprieties, the U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), which is widely considered to contain the most important and sweeping corporate reforms since the 1930s. As can be seen from the above excerpt from President Bushs speech, made during his signing of the Act, one of the objectives of
4、regulators in passing SOX is to ensure the reliability of financial reporting and to prevent companies from artificially driving up stock prices to mislead investors. In this study, we examine whether the internal control reporting requirements of SOX help to enhance the quality of financial reporti
5、ng by ensuring conservative accounting practices.3Unlike Doyle et al. (2007a) and Ashbaugh-Skaife et al. (2008a), which examine the relation between internal control quality and accruals quality, we choose accounting conservatism as our measure of financial reporting quality. This is because Watts (
6、2003a,2003b) argues that conservative accounting benefits the users of a firms accounting reports, by preventing managers from introducing bias and noise into contractual accounting measures in order to overpay themselves. Also, conservative accounting results in the early termination of negative NP
7、V (Net Present Value) investments and mitigates the incentives of managers, in reporting accounting measures used in a contract, to undertake negative NPV project behavior. Therefore, the interests of stakeholders are better protected when managers practice conservative accounting than when they do
8、not. In sum, accounting conservatism is an important feature of high quality financial reporting.We first examine whethe weak internal controls are associated with less conservative accounting. If such a relation exists, then the regulators emphasis on internal controls to prevent companies from usi
9、ng overly aggressive accounting practices is justified and would benefit stockholders. In addition, in order to allo stronger inferences to be made about the effects of internal control weaknesses (ICWs) on accounting conservatism, we conduct inter-temporal tests of the changes in the status of inte
10、rnal controls. We specifically examine whether firms that disclose, and later remediate, ICWs show greater accounting conservatism than firms that continue to have such weaknesses. Lastly, as Watts (2003a) contends that a demand for accounting conservatism arises from litigation, we expect the discl
11、osure of ICWs under SOX to potentially increase the litigation risks of these firms (i.e., as a result of their overly aggressive accounting practices or less conservative accounting). Hence, we also examine whether firms with ICWs report more conservatively after the disclosure of these weaknesses.
12、Such conservative reporting behavior will provide evidence that the reporting requirements have a disciplining effect on firms to report conservatively and will mitigate investors concerns that earnings and net assets are overstated.Following Basu (1997) and Watts (2003a, 2003b), we define conservat
13、ism as the application of a higher standard of verification for favorable information, whereby accounting income reflects “bad news” on a more timely basis than “good news.” We operationalize accounting conservatism in a number of ways. Two tests of conditional conservatism, based on Basu, are widel
14、y applied in empirical accounting research. First, we use a piecewise linear regression of earnings on contemporaneous stock returns to examine whether weak internal controls are associated with lower timeliness to reflect bad news. Second, we examine whether weak internal controls are negatively as
15、sociated with the rate of the reversal of negative earnings changes. Finally, to overcome the potential limitations associated with the interpretations and assumptions underlying the approaches of Basu, we conduct additional tests of conditional conservatism as suggested by Ball and Shivakumar (2005
16、, 2006), namely accrual-based conditional conservatism.Using a sample of firms which disclosed at least one material weakness (MW) from January 2003 to November 2005, we find results that are generally consistent with our expectations.4 First, we find that firms with weak internal controls, as proxied by the existence of at least one MW, exhibit lower levels of accounting conservatism compared to control firms without such weaknesses. This result is in line wi
