یک بازی کارآگاهی در حسابرسی داخلی و تاثیر سوت زنی An inspection game of internal audit and the infuence of whistle‑blowing

1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation By employing game theory, Fandel (1979) shows that the optimality of decision processes within organizations is a key factor in business processes. In the sense of e.g. Fandel and Trockel (2013), this optimality can be jeopardised by employees or managers who may strive to achieve individually optimal goals rather than targets that are optimal for the company as a whole and, hence, abuse the board’s trust in them, see Güth and Kliemt (2007). At this, Küpper (2007) stresses that companies are constantly confronted with moral problems as managers may fnd it acceptable to be corruptive or act fraudulently for their own good. Recent empirical evidences for this are the faked emission numbers of Volkswagen revealed in 2015, the LIBOR scandal disclosed in 2011 involving traders of e.g. the Deutsche Bank or the scandal of Siemens’ managers and sales staf bribing government ofcials. As a consequence, regulators and auditing standard boards have tried to improve corporate governance systems during the last years by means of defning compliance rules. Examples for this are the Dodd-Frank-Act (2010), the updated Internal Control Framework of the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (2013) or the three lines of defence model of The Institute of Internal Auditors (2013). Besides the regulatory framework, frms invest considerably in the prevention and detection of fraud (Liekweg 2014). According funds not only go to internal control mechanism via internal auditing, but also to company-internal ethics programs. These can be seen as a key element of an ethical culture where respective formal training is intended to foster compliant behaviour of managers (Schwartz 2013). In view of the efcacy of this formal training, Malmstrom and Mullin (2013) show by means of anonymous exit surveys that violations of the code of ethics is tolerated by a signifcant amount of participants. Hildreth et al. (2016) furthermore show that the content of the code of ethics is of vital importance. They establish that if formal training conveys loyalty towards the company as part of the code, managers act fraudulently more likely. Taken together, it can be expected that fraudulent behaviour of managers will not cease to exist. To encourage employees of a fraudulent manager to provide respective information, companies implement e.g. an internal whistle-blower hotline, where audit committee chairs typically consider the internal audit to administer such a system (Soh and Martinov-Bennie 2011). Given this point of contact, the information transfer from the whistle-blower to the auditor is found to be successful if anonymous reporting, organizational support as well as strong monetary incentives are granted to the former (Lee and Fargher 2013). This company-internal support, however, is prone to not completely take account of probable costs for whistle-blowers, as e.g. the identity of the latter may leak to others (Dyck et al. 2010). Consequences thereof can be seen in the whistle-blower being dismissed by the fraudulent manager as well as in social costs arising from the harassment of colleagues or from public interest if the whistle-blower’s identity is leaked outside the company (Crook 2000).