We measure experience using firm age. We calculate firm age as the number of years the firm has price data available on Compustat, with a maximum of 30 years. Clearly this is not a perfect measure of the age of the firm, as the longevity of the firm prior to going public remains unknown. However, the actual age of the firm is not available, and thus we follow prior literature in the calculation of this variable (e.g., Carter and Lynch 2001). Referring to Table 4, the median material weakness firm is 10 years old, while the median 2003 Compustat firm is 11 years old. The difference between the groups is marginally significant under the Wilcoxon rank-sum test (p-value = 0.060). Thus, there IS weak uni variate evidence that the disclosure of material weaknesses is associated with firm experience.