본 연구는 기업들이 내부회계관리제도의 품질을 향상시키기 위하여 투입하는 내부회계관리제도 인원수와 감사위원회의 특성들이 어떤 관계를 갖고 있는 지를 실증적으로 분석하였다. 감사위원회가 어떤 특성을 가질 때 내부회계관리제도에 대한 인적자원투자수준에 긍정적 영향을 미치는 지를 살피기 위하여 2004년부터 2009년까지의 표본기간 동안 감사위원회가 설치된 거래소 상장기업들을 대상으로 실증 분석을 실시하였다. 분석에 고려된 감사위원회의 특성은 감사위원회의 활동 성, 회계전문성, 감사위원의 계속재임기간, 감사위원의 다른 상장회사 이사직 겸직 수이다. 내부회계관리제도 인원수에 영향을 미칠 수 있는 기업의 다른 특성들을 통제한 후, 내부회계관리 제도 인원수에 감사위원회 특성들이 미치는 영향을 분석하였다. 분석결과 기업규모가 클수록, 30대 기업집단 기업일수록, 수출비중이 높고 성장성이 높은 기업일수록 내부회 계관리제도 인원수는 많은 반면에 최대주주지분율이 클수록 내부회계관리제도 인원수가 작다는 결과를 얻었다. 본 논문의 주된 관심변수들인 감사위원회의 활동성, 회계전문성, 감사위원의 계속재임기간은 모두 내부회계관리제도 인원수와 유의 적인 양(+)의 관계를 보였고, 감사위원이 다른 상장회사의 이사직을 겸직하고 있는 수는 회계와 재무부서의 내부회계관 리제도 담당 인원수에 대해서만 유의적인 양(+)의 관계를 보였다. 이러한 결과는 감사위원회의 회계전문가의 임명에 관 한 자기선택편의를 통제한 이후에도 여전히 성립하였으며, 종속변수를 종업원 1인 당 내부회계관리제도 인원으로 바꾼 경 우에도 분석결과에 변함이 없었다.
Large-scale accounting frauds such as Enron and WorldCom revealed several problems in the external auditors`gatekeeper role, thus imposing strong demand that corporations strengthen their internal monitoring mechanisms. In 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted to reinforce the responsibilities of the manager and external auditor for internal control over financial reporting(hereafter, “ICFR”). In South Korea, several accounting reform efforts introduced a strict regulation for ICFR. This regulation required firms to focus full-blown attention on their ICFR. The quality of financial statements can be guaranteed to some degree through effective external auditing even if firms maintain poor accounting and internal control over financial reporting system. However, the long-run reliability of financial statements can be fundamentally increased by strengthening ICFR. It takes large investments to establish and operate ICFR of high quality. The problem is that there are strong possibilities of not sufficient investments being made because such investments do not generate short-term profits and rent-seeking managers may be hesitant to make investments for increasing accounting transparency. One of the main reasons that ICFR be regulated is to promote investments to maintain its quality above a certain minimum level. Of course, it takes a lot of considerable investments to maintain internal control over financial reporting at a level beyond the minimum required quality. At the core of the regulation of internal control over financial reporting are evaluation of ICFR effectiveness and report its results. Managers are required to establish ICFR system including relevant organization and rules, regularly assess the effectiveness of the system, and report the evaluation results to the audit committee. An external auditor needs to provide her review opinion about whether the managers` evaluation report is appropriate. The audit committee assesses the effectiveness of ICFR from an independent standpoint, reviews the manager`s evaluation procedures and results, and reports to the board of directors. The audit committee also reviews an external auditor`s evaluation plans for ICFR and results, and approves them. Such an evaluation process allows any defects of ICFR to be detected, reported to the board of directors, and revised quickly. Since the evaluation results are also disclosed publicly, managers are strongly motivated to maintain the quality of internal control over financial reporting at a certain minimum level or higher. It is essential that the audit committee and external auditors should make independent and effective assessment of ICFR in order to facilitate sufficient investments to ICFR, which is the essential purpose of its regulation. The audit committee will especially exercise important influences on the manager`s decision about investing resources for ICFR since it supervises the ICFR evaluations performed by the manager and external auditor. In this paper, we examined the relation between audit committee composition characteristics and number of ICFR -related personnel for the KSE-listed companies for the period of 2004 to 2009. Independent variables of the regression model are audit committee accounting expertise, audit committee members` tenure, audit committee members` multiple directorship while controlling audit committee size, audit committee independence and audit committee meeting frequency. Because there are potential endogeneity between the level of ICFR- related personnel and audit committee accounting expertise, we formally deals with this self-selection problemby utilizing Heckman`s method. We found that firmsize, business group(so called chaebol), board independence, operating complexity, and growth potential showed statistically significant positive relation with the dependent variables(the number of ICFR personnel). On the other hand, institutional investors` share-holdings, the largest owner`s share-holdings and absolute value of discretionary accruals have statistically significant negative relation with the dependent variables. Finally, all of our main independent variables showed statistically significant positive relation with the dependent variables except for the multiple directorship, which has statistically significant positive relation only with the number of ICFR personnel belonged to the accounting and finance department. The results imply that expertise gained through experiences in corporate accounting and auditing practice play useful roles to effectively perform the responsibility of assessing internal control over financial reporting, which requires a considerable level of professionalism. The results also show that there will be positive impacts on the increase of human resource investments in ICFR when audit committee members share much information among them, and between internal and external auditors through frequent meetings, private knowledge learned about a certain company by serving many years as an audit committee member, and pile up experiences through multiple directorship. The study also analyzed companies that voluntarily set up an audit committee and those that were forced to set up one. The analysis showed that audit committee meeting frequency had significant positive relationship with the number of personnel in internal control over financial reporting in both groups. In addition, audit committee accounting expertise showed significant positive relationship in the latter group, while audit committee members` tenure and multiple directorship such relationship in the former group. Analysis of comparing results before and after the establishment of external auditor`s ICFR review standards. It was found there were no significant differences before and after the establishment. Finally, a sensitivity analysis on the reliability of the disclosed ICFR personnel data was performed. When the observations having the entire department staffs as the personnel of internal control over financial reporting were excluded from the analysis, results regarding audit committee meeting frequency, audit committee members` tenure, and audit committee members` multiple directorship showed no significant changes, but audit committee accounting expertise lost its significance. However, caution must be paid to this results because eliminating data is not a perfect method to examine whether disclosed data are reliable.