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.