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After the recent financial crises, regulators have started reform projects for the auditor's report, the part of a company's financial statements that presents the auditor's opinion. One of the reforms is the transition from a standardised auditor's report without any company-specific information to a report that discloses company-specific information in the so-called key audit matters, significant risks of material misstatement in the company's financial statements. In this paper, we investigate whether a specific subset of the key audit matters, namely those that are IT-related, can be a useful source of company-specific information. Information on IT is important for stakeholders: research in the past decades has shown that IT can potentially disrupt industries, affect a company's stock market value, create risks for a company's continuity, or endanger the integrity of the financial statements. Company-specific information on IT is therefore relevant, but it is also scarce, as there are hardly any mandatory disclosures and companies do not frequently disclose IT-related information voluntarily. IT-related key audit matters could fill a gap in information availability for stakeholders such as investors, auditors and academics. We study the auditor's reports in the financial statements of the companies list on the main Dutch stock market, the AEX. This Dutch market regulator has been a frontrunner for the implementation of the new auditor's report: disclosure of key audit matters has been voluntary in 2012, and mandatory since 2013. In the 75 annual reports, we identify 255 key audit matters, 39 of which were IT-related. We find that the IT-related key audit matters already contain useful information for investors. However, both auditors and academics can play a role in further development of the value of key audit matter disclosures. We argue that auditors may need to pay more attention to high-risk areas such as cyber security. We encourage academics to identify and design innovations of the auditor's report proactively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has attracted the attention of both marketing practitioners and researchers over the last decade. Significant progress has been made in identifying and researching the components of CRM individually and in the design of a strategic framework. The role of CRM applications, customer information, customer interaction, customer loyalty and a customer-centric strategy has been the subject of research lately. However no comprehensive research has been conducted into the role of these CRM components in achieving CRM success across the line. Also we have yet to find research that empirically shows evidence for the relationship between each CRM component. The goal of our research is to determine the impact of CRM components on each other and on CRM success. We will strive to do so by using explorative qualitative research into CRM practitioners to formulate propositions. These propositions will in turn be tested in a quantitative analysis of data collected from 250 Dutch companies. Through building a Structural Equations Model (SEM), we determine the role and influence of the key components of CRM on each other and on CRM success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]