Regulators are constantly trying to find ways to improve audit quality. The findings in this paper are useful to policymakers in understanding the benefits of a joint audit. It is also useful to companies and investors who are interested in what audit pairs provide a superior audit.
Lobo, Gerald J., L. Paugam, D. Zhang, and J. Francois Casta. 2017. “The Effect of Joint Auditor Pair Composition on Audit Quality: Evidence from Impairment Tests”. Contemporary Accounting Research 34.1 (2017): 118.
Regulators across the globe have been trying to find ways to increase audit quality, and one idea that has been proposed is requiring joint audits. Currently, joint audits are mandatory in France for any company preparing consolidated financial statements. This paper examines whether the auditor pair composition is related to audit quality. The three auditor compositions are Big4-Big 4 (BB), Big4-non-Big 4 (BS), and non-Big 4 non-Big 4 (SS). For the purposes of this study only BB and BS pairs are analyzed. The impairment of goodwill is examined to measure audit quality. This is due to management’s large discretion for the impairment of goodwill. The way auditor’s handle the impairment of goodwill often highlights how well they are maintaining objectivity and transparency of the auditor’s tests. It is important to note in BS pairs the Big 4 firm is most likely to be the one performing the impairment test.
The sample includes French firms from the SBF 250 index for the years 2006-2009. There were a total of 551 observations for the BB and BS pairs. The authors examined how the auditor pair type affected recognition of economic impairment and transparency of impairment-related disclosures.
Overall, the authors find that BS audit pairs are associated with having a higher audit quality when compared to BB audit pairs. The authors believe this is due to a better coordination and development of a hierarchy in BS audit pairs and a higher incentive for better audit quality from the Big 4 firm in BS audit pairs. This is because the Big 4 firm in BS audit pairs are at a higher risk of reputational harm, than if they are paired with another Big 4 auditor in a BB audit pair.
Specifically, the authors find the following:
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There are numerous factors that go into a firm’s decision to cross-list on foreign stock exchanges. One factor firms should consider regarding entrance into the U.S. stock exchange is an increase in audit fees. The evidence from this study indicates this increase can be traced back to costs from the legal environment and increased audit effort.
Bronson, Scott N., A. Ghosh, and C. E. Hogan. 2017. “Audit Fee Differential, Audit Effort, and Litigation risk: An Examination of ADR Firms”. Contemporary Accounting Research 34.1 (2017): 83.
U.S. investors rely on financial statements by foreign firms cross-listed on U.S. stock exchanges. Therefore, these financial statements must comply with accounting standards from the entity’s home country and U.S. standards. Previous studies have identified that audit fees are higher for cross-listed firms and attributed this to added litigation costs. This study examines if there are additional factors causing the audit fees to be higher for cross-listed firms. Specifically, about whether an increase in audit effort is incrementally related to price increases and if audit effort varies based on the stringency of an entity’s home country regulations. The authors presume the additional audit effort will result from the attestation of U.S. GAAP reconciliations and foreign auditor attestation of U.S. audit and independence standards.
The final sample consists of 36,646 observations and only includes entities audited by Big 4 firms. Compustat was used to find U.S.-based publicly traded firms, a list of foreign firms cross-listed in the United States was obtained from Bank of New York Mellon, and foreign non-cross listed publicly traded firms was listed in Worldscope and Compustat Global. The analysis was run using a regression of audit fees.
The authors find the following:
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Sustainability is important to the accounting industry. Accountants have a responsibility to help integrate sustainability into areas such as budgets, resource allocations, and capital expenditure decisions. The evidence from this study indicates what CS activities consumer find important. Management can use this information in developing their business strategies related to CS.
Bradford, Marianne, J. B. Earp, D. S. Showalter, and P. F. Williams. 2017. “Corporate Sustainability Reporting and Stakeholder Concerns: Is There a Disconnect?”. Accounting Horizons. 31 (1): 83-102.
There has been an increasing number of companies reporting their corporate sustainability (CS) in recent years. Traditionally, CS refers to measures companies take against environmental issues. However, in recent years it is often viewed as the balance between environmental, social, and economic outcomes, also known as the triple bottom line. This expanded definition of CS has caused companies to emphasize different outcomes, and subsequently to have vastly different CS reports. The current guidelines for CS reporting, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework, is consistently updated to account for this expanded view. Additionally, consumers are increasingly being viewed as primary stakeholder groups. This study examines whether the CS information being reported through the GRI framework is adequately addressing consumer stakeholder interests.
The sample contained 505 participants that responded to an online survey in 2013. The link to the survey was posted on the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) website and also onto North Carolina State University’s website. The participants assumed the role of consumers and took the survey which contained 40 scale items and 6 demographic items.
The authors find the following:
Requiring engagement partners to sign their names to audit reports appears to result in increased audit quality, earnings informativeness, and audit fees, suggesting that the signature requirement emphasizes personal accountability for engagement partners. Requiring the identification of engagement partners in audit reports would likely have similar effects. Thus, there are both costs and benefits that the PCAOB should consider in making its decision regarding partner identification.
For more information on this study, please contact Chan Li: chanli@katz.pitt.edu.
Carcello, J. V. and C. Li. 2013. Costs and benefits of requiring an engagement partner signature: Recent experience in the United Kingdom. The Accounting Review 88 (5): 1511-1546.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) is considering requiring the identification of the engagement partner in audit reports. Proponents of the proposal argue that it will increase accountability and transparency, which will result in improved audit quality. Opponents argue that engagement partner identification is unnecessary, as audit firms’ quality control systems and the threats of sanctions by regulators and private litigation are sufficient to hold partners accountable. Identifying engagement partners is similar to them signing audit reports in their own name, which the U.K. began requiring in 2009. Because of the similarities between the U.K. and the U.S., it is likely that the effects of requiring engagement partner identification in the U.S. will be similar to the effects of requiring the engagement partner to sign the audit report in the U.K. Therefore, the authors investigate the benefits and costs of requiring partner signatures in the U.K. in the form of changes in audit quality and audit fees. The results are likely informative of the benefits and costs of requiring partner identification in the U.S.
Using publicly-disclosed data on companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) between 2008 and 2010 (the years surrounding the implementation of the signature requirement), the authors examine audit quality changes using the following measures:
The authors also examine the change in audit fees following the implementation of the signature requirement.
The authors find that following the implementation of the signature requirement, abnormal accruals and the likelihood of meeting earnings thresholds decrease in the U.K. These results suggest that audit clients’ earnings management declines due to the signature requirement. Further, the association between return on assets and stock market returns increases following the signature requirement, implying that reported earnings becomes more informative of firm value to investors following the implementation of the signature requirement. The likelihood of audit clients receiving a qualified audit opinion following the signature requirement also increases, suggesting that audit reporting becomes more conservative with the signature requirement. Finally, audit fees increase with signature requirement. Thus, signature requirement appears to result in higher fees for audit clients. These changes do not occur for U.S. firms or other European firms during the same period and do not occur for the U.K. in the period prior to the introduction of the signature requirement, providing evidence that the changes in the U.K. are the result of the signature requirement.
The authors’ results may be of interest to policy makers for two important reasons. First, regulatory discussions on mandatory audit firm rotation could have implications for the cost and quality of auditing if a client is forced to switch from a compatible auditor to one that is less compatible. Second, proposals to expand the auditor’s reporting responsibilities might mitigate the loss of audit quality when similarity arises in unaudited disclosures.
Brown, S. V. and W. R. Knechel. 2016. Auditor-Client Compatibility and Audit Firm Selection. Journal of Accounting Research 54 (3): 725-775.
A great number of factors affect the complicated process of a client selecting an auditor. The factors that might affect the degree of compatibility between an auditor and a client include pricing, expertise, location, interpersonal associations and the extent of agency problems in the client. Research in the past has looked into some of these attributes and how they are relevant in determining the overall quality of the resulting audit. A limited amount of research has examined alignment between clients and certain types of auditors based on factors such as the size of the audit firm or degree of industry specialization. However, there is less research on the compatibility of specific auditors and specific clients. The authors define auditor-client compatibility as the ability of the auditor to satisfy a client’s preferences, given the auditor’s own preferences, abilities and constraints. With this in mind, the authors examine the narrative disclosures included in the text-based parts of the financial statements that provide information about a company, its operations and its accounting choices. Next, they develop a unique measure of auditor-client compatibility for Big 4 firms based on the similarity of their financial disclosures rather than their financial results.
The authors focus on three narrative disclosures separately and together: the company’s business description, the accounting footnotes, and management discussion and analysis. They also compare the similarity of an individual client to all of the current clients within an industry of a specific auditor to generate a proxy for how well that company fits into each auditor’s client base.
These findings should be of interest to policy makers in China because, among other implications, the results suggest that Chinese regulators should pay attention to the switching of audit partners before they reach tenure limit for mandatory rotation. Partner-level opinion shopping could be more difficult to detect in markets in which the identity of the engagement partner is not disclosed, and it may therefore be prevalent in those markets, such as the United States.
Chen, F., A. Peng, S. Xue, Z. Yang, and F. Ye. 2016. Do Audit Clients Successfully Engage in Opinion Shopping? Partner-Level Evidence. Journal of Accounting Research 54 (1): 79-112.
Opinion shopping refers to the practice by which audit clients seek alternative auditors willing to give a clean audit opinion when the incumbent auditor is likely to issue an unclean opinion. Existing studies examine whether companies successfully engage in opinion shopping through switching audit firms using data from such countries as China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In this study, the authors examine evidence of switching audit partners within the same firm rather than switching to another firm for clean audit opinions, which they term “partner-level opinion shopping.” Statements from the PCAOB suggest that partner-level rotation shopping has become a regulatory concern and the regulators believe that this practice may be more prevalent if the names of engagement partners are not publicly disclosed; however, there is no empirical evidence on the existence and extent of partner-level opinion shopping to the best of the authors’ knowledge. Consequently, the authors attempt to fill this gap in the auditing literature by testing whether companies successfully engage in partner-level opinion shopping.
The authors decided to use data from China because engagement partners in China are required to sign the audit report, which enables the authors to identify partner switches before partners reach their mandatory rotation limit. The sample consists of observations from 1998 to 2012. They use an audit reporting model to determine a company’s probability of receiving a modified audit opinion (MAO) with and without a partner switch.
The results of this study have implications for regulatory agencies and standard-setting bodies. As regulators contemplate whether to mandate IFRS and standard setters determine the level of implementation guidance for new standards, the litigation consequences of standard precision are an important consideration. Further, these results highlight the importance of regulators developing ways for jurors to evaluate audit judgments under imprecise standards, especially in industries and areas without precise industry reporting norms. Prior discussion on this issue has focused on how professional judgment frameworks are necessary to protect auditors and their clients from second guessing. This study suggests that judgments frameworks, if effective, may help protect auditors who make conservative judgments and also help hold auditors accountable for overly aggressive judgments.
Kadous, K., and M. Mercer. 2016. Are Juries More Likely to Second-Guess Auditors Under Imprecise Accounting Standards? Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory 35 (2): 101-117.
U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are generally viewed as more precise than International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in that the former tend to contain more detail about implementation and compliance than the latter. Convergence efforts between U.S. GAAP and IFRS are on going, and have led to greater imprecision in U.S. accounting standards in areas such as lease accounting and revenue recognition. These imprecise standards require increased professional judgment by managers and auditors, which has led to concern that the adoption of less precise standards will result in more second-guessing of auditor judgments by juries and thus greater legal liability. This study seeks to address this concern and examines whether juries are more likely to second-guess auditors’ judgments under an imprecise accounting standard compared to a precise accounting standard.
The authors recruited undergraduate students enrolled in introductory accounting courses at a large university as participants for this study. Two administrations were conducted with the students who participated in a simulated case that lasted 45 minutes during their accounting lab session. Participants acted as jurors in an auditor negligence case involving revenue recognition and were given information related to SFAS No. 66 (Real Estate) to help in their evaluation. The authors manipulated the precision of the accounting guidance as either precise or imprecise. The aggressiveness of the client’s reporting choice was manipulated as either aggressive or conservative.
The results of this experiment suggest that auditors’ fear about second-guessing by juries under imprecise accounting standards is warranted. Under an imprecise standard, conservative accounting choices are more likely to be called into question and result in negligence verdicts, ex post.
These findings indicate that rather than being overly harsh, juries appear to be overly lenient when auditors allow aggressive accounting under an imprecise standard. A lack of precision appears to make it more difficult for juries to identify whether an auditor’s judgment was reasonable or unreasonable.
This paper provides new evidence on how higher-audit quality benefit companies in debt contracting. Specifically, the authors show that Big 4 audit clients enjoy a longer debt maturity than non-Big 4 clients. This audit quality effect on debt maturity exists worldwide but varies with each country’s legal institutions governing property rights and creditor rights. This paper helps to resolve the mix views in prior literature on the role of Big 4 auditors and stresses the importance of considering legal institutions in analyzing the link between auditor choice and economic outcomes.
Ghoul, S. E., O. Guedhami, J. A. Pittman, and S. Rizeanu. 2016. Cross-Country Evidence on the Importance of Auditor Choice to Corporate Debt Maturity. Contemporary Accounting Research 33 (2): 718–751.
Prior research finds audited financial statements provide useful information to lenders and help lenders to better monitor the borrowing companies. However, there is little empirical evidence on how higher-audit quality affects the lender’s choice on monitoring mechanisms. The authors intend to provide the initial and international evidence on how lenders weigh the monitoring from auditors against their own monitoring through shorter debt maturity. Because the Big 4 auditors is generally accepted in academic literature as a proxy for higher-audit quality, the authors examine whether engaging Big 4 auditors benefits the companies in debt contracting. The degree of legal institutions governing property rights and creditor rights various across countries. The authors argue strong legal institutions can amplify the effect of audit quality on debt maturity because monitoring from the Big 4 auditors is more rigorous and borrowers are ex ante incentivized to be honest. Therefore, the authors next investigate whether legal institutions mediate the link between auditor choice and debt maturity.
The initial sample consists of all public companies from 42 countries around the world, including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and so on, for 10-year period from 1994 to 2003. The company financial and audit data are from COMPUSTAT Global database. The authors first examine whether companies with Big 4 auditors have higher proportion of long-term debt in their capital structure. They then test whether legal institutions have a mediating effect on the relationship between audit quality and debt maturity.
The initial sample consists of all public companies from 42 countries around the world, including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and so on, for 10-year period from 1994 to 2003. The company financial and audit data are from COMPUSTAT Global database. The authors first examine whether companies with Big 4 auditors have higher proportion of long-term debt in their capital structure. They then test whether legal institutions have a mediating effect on the relationship between audit quality and debt maturity.
The results of this study are important to understanding the potential benefits of joint engagement partner audits compared to single-partner audits. The results of this study identify an association between the type of partner audit (joint vs. single) and audit quality and audit fees. As regulators consider the association between joint audits and audit quality, the results of this study suggest there are benefits to joint-partner audits, particularly when the partners are located in the same office. Compared to single-partner audits, joint-partner audits are associated with higher audit quality. Compared to joint audit firms, joint-partner audits appear to provide the same benefits without the increased cost.
Ittonen, K., and P. C. Trønnes. 2015. Benefits and costs of appointing joint audit engagement partners. Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 34 (3): 23-46.
Audits using joint engagement partners versus audits using a single engagement partner may produce significant benefits. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between joint engagement partners and audit quality and audit fees. The authors of the study predict that joint audit partners improves audit quality via benefits in knowledge and experience, consultation availability with a joint partner, and reducing client-specific knowledge lost due to partner rotation.
The authors use 1,345 firm-year observations from the NASDAQ OMX Exchanges in Finland and Sweden for the period 2005 to 2009.
This study provides useful insights into how audit-partner quality affects engagement-level quality and underscores the importance of audit-partner identification; furthermore, this study could lead to future research which can explore whether audit-partner quality affects the cost of equity and debt capital above and beyond audit-firm and audit-client characteristics with the hopes of deepening the understanding of auditor performance and the market perception of auditor reputation at the audit-partner level.
Wang, Yanyan, Lisheng Yu, and Yuping Zhao. 2015. The Association between Audit-Partner Quality and Engagement Quality: Evidence from Financial Report Misstatements. Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory 34 (3): 81-111.
This paper attempts to address two specific research questions in this paper:
Most of the research that has been done on this subject focuses on firm-level or office-level audit quality; however, it is the opinion of the authors that both firm-level and office-level audit quality is driven by the quality of the engagements supervised by individual audit partners. As a result, the authors decided to investigate just how integral of a role audit partners actually play in the engagement quality equation. This research is especially interesting for the following reasons:
The authors collected their evidence by merging data from the following sources for the period 2004-2009: