Investor Judgements on Going Concern Prospects: The Impact of KAM Versus MURGC Reporting and Management's Internal Versus External Attributions

ABSTRACT The implementation of enhanced auditor reporting requirements has changed how the audit report conveys information about the appropriateness of the reporting entity's use of the going concern assumption. In response to audit practitioners' concerns about how financial statement users respond to going concern matters reported as a Material Uncertainty Related to Going Concern (MURGC) or a Key Audit Matter (KAM), we conduct an experiment examining the joint effects of the auditor's going concern disclosure format and management's causal attribution for the issue. We find that investors assess the likelihood of remaining a going concern most favourably when management attributes the cause to an internal, more controllable factor and the matter is disclosed as a KAM.