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The collected data refer to the current Italian situation and is updated to the month of August 2006.
The sections below contain the details about the sample, the scientific assumptions, the questionnaire and the interviews.
4.1 The sample
The research questionnaire, whose details are given in below, was sent to:
-a sample of 50 Italian listed companies registered with the Italian Association of Internal Auditors (AIIA).4 More than one questionnaire was sent to each of the 50 listed companies (the reason was the chance to obtain a higher response rate by sending it to more than one person within the same company) for a total of 221 mailings. Thirty-five duly completed questionnaires were returned by the due date (16% of the sample), representing 22 companies (44%). Each of the 35 questionnaires received and subsequently examined were completed by those in charge of Internal Auditing;
-130 chairmen of Boards of Statutory Auditors of Italian listed companies.5 Fifty-nine correctly completed questionnaires were returned, giving a response rate of 45.4% of the considered sample. The researchers decided to focus their attention on the chairmen of statutory auditors as it was expected that they were more skilled and had stronger professional experience; moreover, in this way each company was represented by a single professional. The selection of 130 chairmen (out of 188) was made on the basis of the possibility of contacting them (their addresses were obtained from the Consob website and from email and telephone contacts). For this category of auditors the authors did not consider the control bodies of the alternative accounting and control systems (monistic and dualistic), where there were no statutory auditors. The reason is that only two companies out of the whole sample adopted the dualistic system and one of them the monistic system.
-119 partners of auditing companies that signed a number of financial reports issued by Italian listed companies for the period ending on December 31, 2004.6 Twenty-one fully and correctly completed questionnaires were returned giving a response rate of about 20% of the sample.
4.2 The scientific hypotheses
The authors made four assumptions on the basis of the literature mentioned in Sect. 3 and expressed by the research questions described in the survey.
The first assumption is general and commonly shared by different kinds of auditing roles.
Hypotheses 2,3 and 4 are focused on the single categories of controlling roles and in particular: Internal Auditors, statutory auditors and external auditors.
H1 Having different auditors (even if every auditor is looking at his own specific area) implies governance issues and role redundancies. These factors can cause poor quality of the control procedure and failure of the control processes.
H2 The Internal Auditor role, if it does exist within the company organisation, provides more transparency on certain company issues since the role is atypical and far removed from the old concept of a controlling role.
H3 The statutory auditors, a uniquely Italian role, should emphasise the difficulties of being engaged in auditing a company more clearly since their role is not yet well defined enough to mention their responsibility and the kind of controls to be managed by them.
H4 The external auditors provide a more remote failure risk of a control system since they manage a straight and independent application of auditing standards.
Figure 2 shows the links among the main findings of the literature review, the research questions and the scientific hypotheses, starting from Fig. 1.
4.3 The questionnaire and the interviews
The questionnaire is divided into three sections:
- the first one is focused on the evaluation of the critical aspects of each of the factors explained in Sect. 3 (in particular, if and how they can cause problems for control activities);