major customers require accounting information from suppliers that signals their ability to meet required deliveries with products of the appropriate specifications. Therefore, reliable accounting information is important to the negotiation and monitoring of the trade contract. Without strong internal controls in place, customer-supplier relationships can be damaged because customers will be unable to rely on the information generated by suppliers’ accounting systems, which reduces information transparency. Furthermore, prior literature documents that firms have lower investment efficiency due to information asymmetry associated with weak internal controls (Cheng, Dhaliwal and Zhang [2013]), and this lack of efficiency should affect the ability of supply chain participants to contract. As the disclosure of an ICW is a material negative event (Johnstone, Li and Rupley [2011]), we predict that customers view ICWs as an indication of poor internal control quality that weakens the trust, cooperation and investment efficiency within the supply chain relationship and thus the ability to contract. This increases the probability that such relationships will be terminated in the subsequent period.