This study examines whether internal audit reporting structure and internal audit sourcing arrangement affect financial statement users' perceptions of ability of the internal audit function to prevent financial statement fraud. A survey of lending officers finds that in-house internal audit departments that report to senior management are perceived as less able to provide protection against fraudulent reporting compared to in-house departments that report solely to the board of directors' audit committee. This finding is particularly important in light of the SEC's recent consideration of whether the audit committee should be directly responsible for oversight of the internal auditor. This study does not find a difference in users' perceptions of financial statement fraud prevention between outsourced internal audit teams and in-house internal audit departments when both report to the audit committee. Results suggest that increases in perceived audit expertise may occur with outsourcing, but such increases may not significantly enhance user confidence in the internal audit function because users perceive outsourced teams to have less in-depth knowledge of the company than in-house internal audit departments.

Abstract. In this paper, we recursively construct explicit elements of provably high order in finite fields. We do this using the recursive formulas developed by Elkies to describe explicit modular towers. In particular, we give two explicit constructions based on two examples of his formulas and demonstrate that the resulting elements have high order. Between the two constructions, we are able to generate high order elements in every characteristic. Despite the use of the modular recursions of Elkies, our methods are quite elementary and require no knowledge of modular curves. We compare our results to a recent result of Voloch. In order to do this, we state and prove a slightly more refined version of a special case of his result.

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In this paper, we examine the Lang-Trotter conjecture for elliptic curves which possess rational 3-torsion points. We prove that if one averages over all such elliptic curves then one obtains an asymptotic similar to the one predicted by Lang and Trotter.