Our sample includes only companies whose level of financial distress is high enough to prompt auditors to question the entity’s going-concern status. Prior research indicates that auditors are more likely to issue a going-concern report when the probability of failure (calculated from Zmijewski’s (1984) financial distress prediction model) exceeds 28 percent (Davis and Ashton 2000; Krishnan and Krishnan 1996) Thus, our sample includes publicly held non-financial companies with a probability of failure above 0.28 (based on 1994 financial data) that had not filed for bankruptcy before the audit report, provided that appropriate proxy and financial statement data are available from the Q-Data SEC files