پیامدهای ناخواسته افشای نااطمینانی ایجاد شده توسط حسابرسان و مدیران بر قضاوت های غیر حرفه ای سرمایه گذاران The unintended consequences of uncertainty disclosures made by auditors and managers on nonprofessional investor judgments

1. Introduction A decade of egregious corporate malfeasance, punctuated by the credit crisis of 2007–2008, has highlighted serious concerns in current financial reporting and auditing practices. The public’s diminished trust – and resultant demands for transparency – in financial reporting has led standard setters to revisit auditors’ and managers’ roles in financial reporting. Despite changes in financial reporting resulting from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, concerns still exist that investors do not appropriately identify and account for the uncertainty inherent in fi- nancial statement estimates when making investment decisions (SEC, 2011; 2006). In light of these concerns, regulators (e.g., FASB, 2014) and academics (e.g., Bell & Griffin, 2012; Bratten, Gaynor, McDaniel, Montague, & Sierra, 2013) have made calls for research investigating ways to enhance the salience of uncertainty inherent in financial reporting. To address these issues, regulators recommend two changes to current financial reporting practices. First, on the audit side, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and its international counterpart, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB), suggest that augmented auditor reporting such as emphasis of matter paragraphs in the auditor’s report (hereafter, “EOM”) will draw attention to and thereby increase the salience of management’s uncertainty disclosures (PCAOB, 2016; 2013; IAASB, 2013).1 Second, on the entity side, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) submits that providing investors a range of possible outcomes for estimates will highlight the uncertainty inherent in determining financial statement estimates (FASB, 2014). We propose, however, that these effects are not as straightforward as regulators suggest, particularly when they are implemented jointly. Thus, we examine the effects of auditor EOMs, both independently and in combination with management disclosures of estimate ranges, on investor judgments and decisions. Prior research demonstrates that, consistent with regulators’ expectations, EOMs are effective mechanisms for directing investors’ attentions to specific disclosures (Sirois, Bédard, & Bera, 2017) and that they provide information to investors about financial statement quality (Czerney, Schmidt, & Thompson, 2014). Thus, one might logically expect that if an EOM directs investors’ attentions to an entity-provided footnote highlighting estimate uncertainty, given investors’ aversions to losses (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991), this would decrease investors’ propensities to invest. However, there is evidence to suggest that investors may not respond to EOMs in this manner.