The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board will soon require auditors to disclose critical audit matters (CAMs) to highlight areas of financial statements which are subject to a higher risk of material misstatement. Concurrently, the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board continue their efforts to converge both sets of accounting standards, and the newly converged revenue recognition standard contains a relatively limited amount of implementation guidance. I hypothesize and find that CAMs lower investors’ perceptions of management’s reporting credibility when the financial statement area discussed by CAMs is governed by precise, but not an imprecise, accounting standards. The emphasis of risks via CAMs is incongruent with investors’ expectations about the ability of precise standards to reduce financial reporting risks. The results from this experiment with nonprofessional investors provide insights about the interaction between CAMs and accounting standards.

Introduction

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) recently released AS 3101, The auditor’s report on an audit of financial statements when the auditor expresses an unqualified opinion, which requires the disclosure of critical audit matters (CAMs) in the audit reports of most publicly traded companies. CAMs highlight areas of financial statements which have a higher risk of material misstatement and required an increased amount of auditor judgment. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) (2017) expects that CAMs will improve the information content of audit reports for financial statement users.1 Concurrently, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) continue their efforts to converge both sets of accounting standards. The newly converged revenue recognition standard will soon take effect in the U.S., and it lacks much of the detailed implementation guidance that was included in the previous standard (PwC, 2014; Tysiac, 2014). These changes to accounting and auditing standards may affect managers’ perceived ability to manipulate earnings, which may then influence investors’ perceptions of management’s financial reporting credibility. This study investigates how investors’ perceptions of management’s reporting credibility are influenced by the interaction between CAMs and the precision (i.e., the relative amount of implementation guidance) of the accounting standard that governs the item discussed by CAMs. Christensen, Glover, and Wolfe (2014) provide initial evidence that CAMs decrease nonprofessional investors’ intent to purchase a company’s stock, and they use an experiment that manipulates the inclusion of CAMs to highlight risks associated with fair value measurements.