Internal Audit Independence in the Context of Big Data A Study on the Impact of Dynamic Competitiveness on State-Owned Enterprises

This study employs panel data of A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2018 to 2022 as the baseline sample to empirically examine the impact of internal audit independence on corporate competitiveness in the current year (2018–2022), one-year lag (2019–2023), and two-year lag (2020–2024). Furthermore, it investigates whether this impact exhibits significant heterogeneity across firms with different ownership structures. The results indicate that internal audit independence exerts a significantly positive effect on corporate competitiveness in the current year: specifically, a one-unit increase in internal audit independence is associated with an approximate 8.869-unit rise in competitiveness. This positive impact persists in the one-year lag period but weakens substantially (as reflected by reduced coefficient magnitude and statistical significance). By the third year, however, the effect of internal audit independence on corporate competitiveness becomes statistically insignificant. Further analysis reveals significant ownership-based heterogeneity in the aforementioned relationship: the enhancement of internal audit independence only significantly boosts the current competitiveness of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), while exerting no notable influence on that of non-SOEs. This suggests that strengthening the independent status of internal audit in SOEs constitutes an effective governance mechanism to improve their short-term competitive capacity and responsiveness. Additionally, the moderating role test of data element utilization efficiency shows that this efficiency significantly amplifies the positive impact of internal audit independence on the one-year lagged competitiveness of SOEs. In other words, a higher level of data element utilization efficiency enables internal audit independence to promote corporate competitiveness more effectively in the second year. Nevertheless, this moderating effect becomes ineffective for SOEs in the third year, implying that SOEs can gain substantial short-term audit synergy benefits from improved data element utilization efficiency, but the sustainability of such effects is limited.