Prior research concerning audit fees and earnings management has focused primarily on accruals management. This article shows how the audit fee and audit risk models support auditors’ pricing behavior in a REM setting. Specifically, the results are consistent with auditors, after observing aggressive REM, increasing current audit fees to cover the cost of additional effort required to gain reasonable assurance that the financial statement are free of material misstatements and increase both current and future audit fees to cover increases in perceived business risk.
Greiner, A., M. J. Kohlbeck, and T. J. Smith. 2017. The Relationship between Aggressive Real Earnings Management and Current and Future Audit Fees. Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory 36 (1): 85 – 107.
The findings of this study suggest that the training and functional expertise of the CEO can affect the auditor’s perception of engagement risk, observed through a reduction in audit fees. They add to the growing literature of CEO characteristics which highlight how top managers influence firm outcomes.
Kalelkar, R., S. Khan. 2016. CEO Financial Background and Audit Pricing. Accounting Horizons 30 (3): 325-339.
The authors’ results indicate that the complexity associated with auditing more subjectively valued assets may affect audit fees in a manner that is not fully captured by the traditional log transformation. Based on their findings, the authors also suggest that future audit fee studies assess alternative mathematical transformations of client size variables.
Cullinan, C. P., H. Du, and X. Cheng. 2016. Size Variables in Audit Fee Models: An Examination of the Effects of Alternative Mathematical Transformations. Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory. 35 (3): 169-181.
This paper asks whether auditors recognize the volatility of OCI and incorporate it into pricing of audits. They find that audit fees do reflect changes in OCI and that these changes reflect various risk factors associated with OCI. The findings suggest that auditors already recognize the difficulty in assessing value of fair value items which run through OCI—reinforcing regulator concerns about fair value valuation.
Huang, H., S. Lin, K. Raghunandan. 2016. The Volatility of Other Comprehensive Income and Audit Fees. Accounting Horizons 30 (2): 195-210.
The existing research is unclear about the mechanism behind the higher audit fees charged by the industry specialist auditors (ISAs). The fee premium can be explained either by higher audit hours or by higher audit fees per hour. Using Korean data, this study provides direct evidence of the source of the ISA fee premium. The results show ISAs spend more audit hours while charge lower unit price than non-ISAs, which indicates the ISA fee premium mainly comes from additional audit work performed by ISAs. One limitation of this study is the authors cannot differentiate the two potential explanations for the low unit price: cost savings arising from economies of scale or additional work performed by cheap audit labor.
Bae, G. S., S. U. Choi, and J. H. Rho. 2016. Audit Hours and Unit Audit Price of Industry Specialist Auditors: Evidence from Korea. Contemporary Accounting Research 33(1): 314-340.
The study results are important to audit firms and audit clients as they show audit efficiency benefits (lower audit hours and improved audit quality) post-merger. Although a merger with an international Big 4 firm may bring some reputational improvements, mergers with domestic Big 10 firms create improvements in audit efficiency. Audit firms interested in merging in the Chinese market should consider the benefits of local expertise and higher fees in a merger transaction. These results provide further insights into mergers and acquisitions and the benefits of economies of scale when performing audits.
Gong, Q., O. Z. Li, Y. Lin, and L. Wu. 2016. On the Benefits of Audit Market Consolidation: Evidence from Merged Audit Firms. The Accounting Review 91 (2): 463–488.
The results of this study are important to audit firm clients, audit firms, and audit regulators as they evaluate the benefits and costs of industry specialization. For auditors and their clients, the evidence indicates that specialist auditors in homogenous industries, even when complex accounting is involved, achieve economies of scale that are passed on to clients. Clients in homogenous industries appear to benefit from a lower cost audit without a decrease in audit quality. Moreover, audit firms may benefit from increased client retention in these industries because of their expertise and competitive price. And, though audit regulators have expressed concern about concentration in the audit market, the results indicate that concentration can improve audit firms’ economies of scale in homogenous and complex industries without reducing audit quality. As audit clients, audit firms, and audit regulators consider industry specialization, this paper provides support for auditor specialization in homogenous industries.
Bills, K. L., D. C. Jeter, and S. E. Stein. 2015. Auditor industry specialization and evidence of cost efficiencies in homogenous industries. The Accounting Review 90 (5): 1721-1754.
This study provides the first evidence using U.S. data on the relationships between audit planning and pricing and audit partner tenure. Importantly, the results speak to the requirement in SOX Section 203 that audit partners on public clients rotate every five years. The second set of results concerns changes in auditor risk responsiveness during the period 2002 to 2003. Because there are very few longitudinal studies of engagement effort that feature a consistent sample of clients over time, this study contributes to understanding of changes in audit firms’ risk responsiveness.
Bedard, J. C., and K. M. Johnstone. 2010. Audit Partner Tenure and Audit Planning and Pricing. Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 29 (2): 45-70.
The study provides useful insight into current regulatory debates on the auditor’s economic dependence on the client and increases understanding to the reasons why previous research provides mixed evidence on the association between various fee metrics and the extent of earnings management. If the association between abnormal fees and the magnitude of discretionary accruals is conditioned on the sign of abnormal fees, examining the association without reference to the sign of abnormal fees most likely leads to observations of insignificant associations, as also reported in most previous studies. This study’s findings suggest that future research on similar issues should take into account the asymmetric nonlinearity in the fee-quality relation.
Choi, J. H., J. B. Kim, and Y. Zang. 2010. Do Abnormally High Audit Fees Impair Audit Quality? Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 29 (2): 115-140.
The results show that the benefit of greater negotiation experience is contingent on client negotiation style—there is a benefit to assigning auditors with greater negotiation experience to negotiate with a contentious negotiation style client, but not for a client with a collaborative negotiation style. Thus, there are potential effectiveness and efficiency gains from matching auditor negotiation experience (an auditor attribute) with client negotiation style (a client attribute). This study is also helpful to audit researchers when they design negotiation experiments, specifically with respect to whether the negotiation experience level of participants matters in the contexts they examine. This study also contributes to the literature on the effect on auditor judgments of negotiations with clients that vary in their negotiation style.
Fu, H., H. T. Tan, and J. Zhang. 2011. Effect of Auditor Negotiation Experience and Client Negotiating Style on Auditors' Judgments in an Auditor-Client Negotiation Context. Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 30 (3): 225-237.