The difficulty and ambiguity in the going-concern reporting decision may render the auditor susceptible to management pressure. An independent audit committee could help mitigate such pressure by supporting the auditor in disputes with management (Parker 2000). That is, we expect that an audit committee independent of management is more likely to mitigate any management pressure on auditors to issue a clean opinion when a going-concern report is warranted (McMullen 1996). More specifically, we expect that the greater the percentage of affiliated directors on the audit committee, the lower the likelihood
of going-concern reports for financially distressed companies.