Females on audit teams and reporting on internal control: evidence from a supreme audit institution

Egypt’s supreme audit institution, the Accountability State Authority (ASA), requires its audit team members to sign audit reports. We utilise this unique Egyptian feature to investigate a hitherto unexplored relationship between female audit team representation and internal control weakness (ICW) reporting. Using a sample of listed ASA auditees over the 2010–2019 period, we find that female representation on an audit team increases (1) the likelihood of reporting the presence of ICWs, (2) the number of ICWs reported, and (3) the likelihood of reporting the more challenging entity-level ICWs. After decomposing female representation by rank, we find that these results are driven by female representation at the partner and senior levels within the audit team. Our further analyses show that audit team size is not a significant moderator, and the audit team is a more appropriate unit of analysis than the audit partner. Overall, the findings suggest that female representation enhances the ability of audit teams to identify and report ICWs and, therefore, improves audit internal control reporting quality. The findings also highlight the particular importance of female representation in the highest leadership (partner) and core (senior) positions within audit teams. These findings are novel and have profound implications for practitioners and policymakers.