Assuring the Crowd: The Role of Assurance in Securities Crowdfunding Success

This paper examines the role of CPA financial statement assurance in securities crowdfunding. Under SEC Regulation Crowdfunding, effective May 2016, early-stage private companies are permitted to conduct securities crowdfunding offerings—low-dollar securities offerings on Internet platforms—to a large number of investors. Using SEC filings and hand-collected data on the universe of offerings from 2016 to 2019, we examine the relation between CPA assurance and capital raised in the securities crowdfunding market. We fail to find evidence that issuers voluntarily seek higher levels of assurance, and we document high rates of noncompliance with the CPA assurance requirements. Our results suggest the on average positive association between CPA assurance and crowdfunding outcomes shown in prior research is explained by noncompliance with the Reg CF assurance requirements and is not driven by additional assurance. Overall, this study provides new insights of interest to crowdfunding issuers, investors, and regulators on the role of assurance in this nascent market of capital formation for startups. This paper was accepted by Ranjani Krishnan, accounting. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03178 .