Good Value from Shared Values: A fraud and risk perspective

Corporate scandals in the last decade have led to renewed focus by auditors and regulators on fraud, risk assessments, and governance reforms. Hernandez (2007) documents auditor perceived associations between risk indications or concerns on dimensions of management ethics and compensation, performance, governance and fraud across auditor risk assessments performed during the continuance stage of an audit at a ‘Big Four’ firm (from 2002 to 2004). Running three separate sets of ordinal regressions, this study notes that assessed risk of fraud, perceived corporate performance risks, and corporate governance risks are independently associated with each other, as well as positively affected by management ethics and integrity concerns perceived by auditors and the pressure and balance of financial and non-financial goal-setting targets in management compensation contracts. This suggests that managers and entities focused by ethics, values, and sustainable goals (lower integrity concerns, less profits pressure) may present themselves with lower audit risk and benefit investors, reducing contracting and agency risks, which may be by simultaneously associated with fraud, governance, and overall entity performance risks. I extend this result into a theoretical model where the entity and its customers, suppliers, regulators, and other stakeholders (‘Five Forces’) share corporate values, lowering audit (and entity contracting) risks, resulting in higher entity valu