This finding runs counter to the gym anticipated benefits of requirements that the internal audit function report directly to the audit committee, and it reveals potential conflicts of interest and indepen- dence threats created by the audit committee itself. We also investigate the effects offraud risk decomposition on risk assessments made by internal auditors. We find that fraud risk assessment decomposition does not have the same effects on internal auditors as it has on external auditors, and the effects of decomposition do not align with the expected benefits f decomposition.