Prior research posits that ineffective internal controls allow or introduce bothintentionalandunintentionalmisstatementsintothefinancialreporting process that lead to lower quality accruals. Consistent with this conjecture, these studies find that firms reporting ICDs exhibit greater noise in accruals(Ashbaugh-Skaifeetal.[2008],Doyle,Ge,andMcVay[2007a])and larger abnormal accruals relative to firms not reporting ICDs (AshbaughSkaife et al. [2008]). In this study, we posit that ineffective internal control results in less reliable financial reporting, thus increasing the information risk faced by investors that manifests in a higher cost of equity.1