this study investigates whether the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS5, PCAOB 2007), which was introduced in June 2007, makes the audit process timelier in an extended post-AS5 period from 2007 to 2011 relative to a pre-AS5 period of 2006–2007. For this, we focus on evaluating the AS5 effect on audit report lags (ARL) both for the firms with material internal control weaknesses (ICW) and the firms with a clean SOX 404 opinion (non-ICW). ARL, a proxy for audit effort, has long been an important topic of academic research because ARL is considered critical in influencing timely judgment and decision making by financial statement users.1 SOX Section 404 requires the management of public firms to provide assessments of the effectiveness of their internal control (Section 404(a)), and for auditors of accelerated filers (with market float of $75 million or more) to
provide an independent opinion of clients’ internal control over financial reporting (Section 404(b))
(U.S. House of Representatives 2002). Later, the PCAOB introduced Auditing Standard No. 2, An
Audit of Internal Control over Financial Reporting Performed in Conjunction with an Audit of
Financial Statements (AS2, PCAOB 2004), effective from November 2004, to provide guidance to
auditors of accelerated filers on performing internal control audits