Due to the expansion of the mandate assigned to public auditors in the past decades, audit reports have become more prominent indicators of the quality of government. Accordingly, it is important to investigate the factors that shape the communication of audit findings. We suggest that while internal and legislative auditors belong to the same community of practice, they are also embedded in distinct institutional environments that incentivize them to report their findings in different ways. In particular, we hypothesize that to draw attention and mobilize support for their work, legislative auditors are encouraged to use a language that is more negative and emotive than internal auditors. Applying methods of computational text analysis to a corpus of 3245 audit reports produced in the Government of Canada between 2000 and 2019, we present empirical evidence in favor of these hypotheses. Among other things, our findings provide large-sample evidence that despite comparable professional norms and guidance, public auditors are sensitive to their institutional context and, in response to their environment, resort to rhetorical strategies to either amplify or mitigate the reputational risks associated with their reports.

中文翻译：

---

制度嵌入和问责语言：来自加拿大 20 年公共审计报告的证据

由于过去几十年分配给公共审计员的任务不断扩大，审计报告已成为政府质量的更突出指标。因此，调查影响审计结果交流的因素很重要。我们建议，虽然内部审计师和立法审计师属于同一个实践社区，但他们也嵌入在不同的制度环境中，这些环境激励他们以不同的方式报告他们的调查结果。特别是，我们假设为了引起人们对他们工作的关注和动员支持，立法审计员被鼓励使用一种比内部审计员更消极、更情绪化的语言。将计算文本分析方法应用于加拿大政府在 2000 年至 2019 年期间制作的 3245 份审计报告的语料库，我们提供了支持这些假设的经验证据。除其他外，我们的研究结果提供了大样本证据，表明尽管有可比的专业规范和指导，公共审计师对其制度环境很敏感，并且为了应对他们的环境，诉诸修辞策略来放大或减轻与其相关的声誉风险报告。