| Summary: | 碩士 === 東吳大學 === 企業管理學系 === 106 === The last decade has witnessed frequent cases as business bankruptcy and man-made fraud due to unfulfilled internal control in businesses. A sound internal control mechanism helps businesses prevent losses. Most public companies are in lack of auditors, capable of locating importance projects through risk assessment and making appropriate allocation of resources. Recent studies on audit mostly focused on investigations into corporate governance, fraud, performance enhancement, and auditors’ skills. Other studies concerning risk assessment mainly probed into specific issues in diverse disciplines, and few studies have carried out a comprehensive discussion. While the importance of risk assessment has been recognized by auditors and the structure of risk assessment management has been proposed by international organizations such as COSO, recent technological advances and rapid changes in the overall environment have made the overall risk profile different from previous ones and more difficult to control. Therefore, it is vital to have a thorough investigation into risk factors, helping auditors know the trend of important risk factors in current moments and further enhance the effectiveness of risk assessment.
This study included the trend of emerging risks for risk factor examination. In the first stage, a cluster analysis was used to merge and cluster similar risk factors, with analysis of managerial implications from clustering risk carried out in the second stage. In the second stage, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP) method were adopted for analysis of collected surveys. The cluster results in the first stage could be combined with the business ecosystem for further investigation of the business ecosystem and constructs of risk factors. The survey analysis in the second stage revealed that the financial risk cluster topped the rank in weights of DANP, followed by environmental governance risk and business interruption risk. Therefore, companies should appropriately manage the aforementioned important risk factors. Furthermore, the legal risk cluster held the second last position in DANP, while the external environment risk cluster held the last place in weights of DANP. Reasons for such differences are worth attention to authorities or business auditors.
Examining the cluster results in the first stage in terms of the business ecosystem could also be linked with actual practices. Future researchers, thus, should go beyond previous categorization of risk sources and construct industrial risk factors in light of business ecosystem. In recent years, competent authorities have kept amending regulations to reinforce supervisory responsibilities of the related parties in a company. The issue of whether relevant amendments meet expectations, influence the attitude towards business operation, and affect industrial risk factors is still unclear. Therefore, the relationship between risk factors and the operation environment is still worth investigation. While expert survey was employed in this study, companies having their own auditors were not entirely included for data collection, thus yielding the limitation in sample representativeness. The interrelationship among risk factors relied on experts’ subjective experience; however, diverse experiences among the experts set their perspectives about risk factors apart. Such an examination was a general perspective, not suitable for applying to specific industries.
Keywords: internal control, risk factor, emerging risk trend, clustering, DEMATEL, DEMATEL-based ANP (DANP), business ecosystem
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