Assurance and consultancy internal audit roles in information technology risk management and investment decisions

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the disclosure of assurance and consultancy internal auditing roles in information technology (IT) risk management on investment decisions. The methodology used is an experiment where the disclosure of assurance and consultancy internal auditing roles in IT risk management and judgments about investments are made for three internal auditing disclosure in IT risk management scenarios. The results indicate that the disclosure of internal auditing roles in IT risk management has a positive impact on either investment decisions or stock market expectations. These results provide evidence that the disclosure of assurance and consultancy internal auditing roles in IT risk management provides signals to the stock markets. This is the first paper to examine whether intentions to invest and stock price expectations might be affected by the disclosure of assurance and consultancy internal auditing roles in IT risk management.