Learning by Doing and Audit Quality*

In this study, we present a nonstrategic, dynamic Bayesian model in which auditors' learning on the job and their choice of professional services jointly affect audit quality. While performing audits over time, auditors accumulate client‐specific knowledge so that their posterior beliefs about clients are updated and become more precise (that is, precision is our surrogate for audit quality) — what we call the learning effect. In addition, auditors can enrich their knowledge accumulation by performing nonaudit services (NAS) that, in fact, may influence clients' managerial decisions — what we call the business advisory effect. This advisory effect permits auditors to anticipate and to learn about changes in clients' business models, which in turn improves their advisory capacity. These dual “learning” and “advisory” effects are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The advisory effect of NAS may increase or reduce auditors' engagement risk. We show that large professional fees can induce auditors to provide NAS that increase engagement risk and diminish audit quality. However, when NAS reduce engagement risk and increase audit quality, auditors may provide NAS without charging clients. The feature that distinguishes our study — the interdependence between the learning and advisory effects — provides new insight into the trade‐off between audit fees and audit quality. Consequently, our analysis helps explain why the scope of the audit has evolved over time and why the boundaries between audit and NAS are constantly shifting. A recent example of such a shift is that the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act adds control attestation to audits for public companies traded in U.S. markets.     

A Note on the Association between Audit Firm Size and Audit Quality*

Abstract. This study proposes that comparison of management earnings forecasts with audited, reported earnings provides an approach to the measurement of audit quality. Assuming that managers have incentives to minimize the difference between forecasted and reported income, higher-quality audit firms will tend to be associated with larger forecast errors. Therefore if, as previous literature suggests, larger auditing firms provide higher-quality audits than do smaller auditing firms, larger auditing firms will tend to be associated with larger forecast errors, all else being equal. Data from the Toronto Stock Exchange are used to examine this proposition. After controlling for client characteristics such as risk, the results indicate that larger auditing firms tend to be associated with larger forecast errors consistent with the proposition that, other things being equal, larger auditing firms provide higher-quality audits than do small auditing firms. Résumé. Les auteurs proposent une technique de mesure de la qualité de la vérification qui consiste à comparer les prévisions de la direction relatives aux bénéfices et les bénéfices déclarés qui ont été vérifiés. Si l'on suppose que les gestionnaires ont intérêt à minimiser l'écart entre les bénéfices prévus et les bénéfices déclarés, les vérificateurs de haut calibre auront tendance à être associés à des erreurs prévisionnelles plus importantes. Par conséquent, si, comme l'ont suggéré les études antérieures, les cabinets d'experts-comptables importants offrent des services de vérification de meilleure qualité que les cabinets d'experts-comptables de taille plus modeste, les cabinets d'experts-comptables importants auront tendance à être associés aux erreurs prévisionnelles plus grandes, toutes choses étant égales. Les auteurs utilisent les données de la Bourse de Toronto pour vérifier cette affirmation. Une fois contrôlées les caractéristiques du client telles que le risque, les résultats indiquent que les cabinets d'experts-comptables de grande taille tendent à être associés aux erreurs prévisionnelles plus importantes, ce qui confirme l'hypothèse voulant que, toutes choses étant égales, les cabinets d'experts-comptables de grande taille offrent des services de vérification de meilleure qualité que les cabinets d'experts-comptables de taille plus petite.     

Legal Penalties and Audit Quality: An Experimental Investigation*

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of legal penalties on audit quality under different legal regimes. We investigate whether audit quality is affected differentially due to the complexity inherent in legal regimes and the frequency of imposing legal penalties. Economic theory predicts that players adopt equilibrium strategies that reflect the expectation that a penalty will be incurred, but the actual occurrences of penalties, if consistent with this expectation, should not prompt an individual to modify his or her strategy. However, learning theory suggests that players' choices will be repeated in the future based on outcomes. We found that penalties triggered both increases and decreases in effort, and seemed to introduce a “shock” that increased the variability of effort. We also observed a “funnel” effect — that is. greater changes in effort closer to the imposition of penalties, and smaller changes as more periods go by without a penalty.     

The Effect of Audit Quality on Earnings Management*

This study examines the relation between audit quality and earnings management. Consistent with prior research, we treat audit quality as a dichotomous variable and assume that Big Six auditors are of higher quality than non-Big Six auditors. Earnings management is captured by discretionary accruals that are estimated using a cross-sectional version of the Jones 1991 model. Prior literature suggests that auditors are more likely to object to management's accounting choices that increase earnings (as opposed to decrease earnings) and that auditors are more likely to be sued when they are associated with financial statements that overstate earnings (as compared to understate earnings). Therefore, we hypothesize that clients of non-Big Six auditors report discretionary accruals that increase income relatively more than the discretionary accruals reported by clients of Big Six auditors. This hypothesis is supported by evidence from a sample of 10,379 Big Six and 2,179 non-Big Six firm years. Specifically, clients of non-Big Six auditors report discretionary accruals that are, on average, 1.5-2.1 percent of total assets higher than the discretionary accruals reported by clients of Big Six auditors. Also, consistent with earnings management, we find that the mean and median of the absolute value of discretionary accruals are greater for firms with non-Big Six auditors. This result also indicates that lower audit quality is associated with more “accounting flexibility”.     

The Significance of Audit Decision Aids and Precase Jurists' Attitudes on Perceptions of Audit Firm Culpability and Liability*

Abstract. During the past decade, public accounting firms have found themselves targets of litigation. The legal costs associated with the “expectations gap” have been observed to be nontrivial. Among the responses made by some firms in the profession is the increased use of auditor decision aids in an effort to improve auditor adherence to a “standard” that these firms believe they can defend in court. However, once implemented, these “standards,” if not adhered to, may have profound legal ramifications. This paper reports on a behavioral study of these issues. The subjects were 82 U.S. general jurisdiction judges. Findings indicate that the jurists did rely on internal firm guidance when evaluating injured-party claims. Résumé. Depuis une dizaine d'années, les cabinets d'experts-comptables ont été la cible de poursuites en justice. Les observations effectuées démontrent que les frais juridiques associés au « déficit par rapport aux attentes » sont appréciables. Certains cabinets de la profession réagissent, entre autres, en recourant davantage aux aides à la décision conçues pour les vérificateurs, de façon à favoriser chez leurs employés le respect de « normes » que ces cabinets estiment pouvoir défendre devant les tribunaux. Or, une fois établies, ces « normes ?, si elles ne sont pas respectées, peuvent avoir de sérieuses conséquences juridiques. Les auteurs rendent compte d'une étude de comportement relative à ces questions. Dans le cadre de cette étude, 82 juges américains de compétence générale ont été interrogés. Les résultats de l'étude indiquent que les juristes se sont appuyés sur les directives internes du cabinet dans l'évaluation des griefs des parties lésées.     

Audit Committees,Boards, and the Quality of Reported Earnings*

I use data on 252 U.S. firms between 1994 and 2000 to study the relationship between audit committees and boards of directors with financial reporting quality. I initially document several changes in committee and board profile during the sample period. Results from logistic regressions suggest that measures of audit committee and board structure are related to earnings quality in a manner that is generally consistent with the predictions of agency theory. This study contributes to extant knowledge by employing different earnings quality measures from prior studies, and by expanding the range of audit committee attributes deemed important in determining audit committee performance.     

Outsourcing and Audit Risk for Internal Audit Services*

Some companies now outsource their internal audit function to public accountants. Internal auditors and accounting firms disagree about the merits of outsourcing. Each type of auditor claims to provide more cost‐effective services and appears to claim superior expertise. This paper uses agency theory to examine outsourcing and reconciles the outsourcing debate without resorting to differential auditor expertise. Under the assumptions that public accountants' “deep pockets” provide incentives to outsource and their higher opportunity cost provides a disincentive, we characterize the optimal employment contract with each auditor. We find that public accountants provide higher levels of testing, but possibly for a higher expected fee. This result supports both the internal auditor's claim as the lower cost provider, and the public accountant's claim of higher quality. We also find that incentives to outsource generally increase in various measures of risk, including the risk that a control weakness exists and the size of the loss that can result from an undetected control weakness.     

Board Characteristics and Audit Fees*

This paper examines the relations between three board characteristics (independence, diligence, and expertise) and Big 6 audit fees for Fortune 1000 companies. To protect its reputation capital, avoid legal liability, and promote shareholder interests, a more independent, diligent, and expert board may demand differentially higher audit quality (greater assurance, which requires more audit work) than the Big 6 audit firms normally provide. The audit fee increases as the auditor's additional costs are passed on to the client, such that we expect positive relations between audit fees and the board characteristics examined. We find significant positive relations between audit fees and board independence, diligence, and expertise. The results persist when similar measures of audit committee “quality” are included in the model. The results add to the growing body of literature documenting relations between corporate governance mechanisms and various facets of the financial reporting and audit processes, as well as to our understanding of the determinants of audit fees.     

The Difficult Client‐Acceptance Decision in Canadian Audit Firms: A Field Investigation*

Auditing is often depicted in scientific and professional literature as being subject to conflicting forces, such as mechanization versus flexibility, and professionalism versus commercialism. This paper examines how auditors actually make the client‐acceptance decision in the midst of these forces. The investigation was conducted via a field study at three Big 6 firms located in Canada. The results show that in all firms the client‐acceptance decision process in action is largely flexible, being characterized by a high degree of informal communication and the adaptation of the client‐acceptance written policies and decision aids to circumstances. Furthermore, while commercialism in one firm (A) has a significant influence on the decision process, in the two other firms (B and C) the decision process is mostly consistent with professionalism. This result conflicts with the concerns that North American regulators have recently expressed about auditors' professionalism.     

An Experimental Investigation of Approaches to Audit Decision Making: An Evaluation Using Systems‐Mediated Mental Models*

The objective of this research is to articulate a decision‐making foundation for the systems audit approach. Under this audit approach, the auditor first gains an understanding of the auditee's economic environment, strategy, and business processes and then forms expectations about its performance and financial reporting. Proponents of this audit approach argue that decision making is enhanced because the knowledge of the system allows the auditor to focus on the most important risks. However, there has not been an explicit framework to explain how systems knowledge can enhance decision making. To provide such a framework, we combine mental model theory with general systems theory to produce a hypothesis we refer to as a systems‐mediated mental model hypothesis. We test this hypothesis using experimental economics methods. We find that (1) subjects make systematic errors under the setting without an organizing framework provided by the systems information, and (2) the presence of an organizing framework results in lower reporting errors. Importantly, the organizing framework significantly enhances decision making in the settings where the environment changed. Establishing a decision‐making foundation for systems audits can provide an important building block that, in part, can contribute to the development of a more effective and efficient audit technology ‐ an important objective now when audits are facing a credibility crisis.     

Management Ownership and Audit Firm Size*

The finance literature identifies two agency problems between managers and outside shareholders. First, there is a divergence‐of‐interests problem as management ownership falls. Second, there is an offsetting entrenchment problem when management ownership increases within intermediate regions of ownership. Agency problems are mitigated through contracting, but contracts are often based on accounting numbers prepared by management. Because accounting numbers must be reliable for contracts to be enforced, agency theory predicts a demand for higher‐quality auditors when agency problems are more severe. However, extant studies find no significant or robust relation between management ownership and audit firm size. In contrast to extant research, this study samples unlisted companies rather than listed companies for two reasons. First, the monitoring value of auditing may be higher in unlisted companies because they are less vulnerable to takeover and they are required to disclose much less nonaccounting information to shareholders. Second, unlisted companies have greater variation in management ownership, which permits more powerful tests of the demand for auditing as ownership varies between 0 percent and 100 percent. Consistent with a divergence‐of‐interests effect, the association between management ownership and audit firm size is found to be significantly negative within low and high regions of management ownership. The association is flatter and slightly positive within intermediate regions of management ownership, suggesting the existence of an opposite entrenchment effect. The negative association and the nonlinearity is consistent with the finance literature and with the predictions of agency theory.     

Pricing of Initial Audit Engagements by Large and Small Audit Firms*

We investigate the extent to which auditors of U.S. companies reduce fees on initial audit engagements (“fee discounting”). We hypothesize that rivalries among sellers, in terms of client turnover and price competition, are more intense among small audit firms. The data support this hypothesis. New clients account for 34 percent of all clients for small audit firms, but only 9 percent of all clients for large audit firms. We theorize that differences in client turnover rates between large and small audit firms can be explained by the market structure of the audit industry, which consists of an oligopolistic segment dominated by a few large audit firms and an atomistic segment composed of many small audit firms. We further hypothesize and confirm that fee discounting is more extensive in the atomistic sector, and our results confirm this hypothesis. Our analysis of audit fee changes indicates that clients who switch auditors within the atomistic sector receive on average a discount of 24 percent over the prior auditor's fee. However, clients who switch auditors within the oligopolistic sector receive on average a discount of only 4 percent. Given that price competition is known to be less intense in oligopolistic markets than in atomistic markets, we believe that market structure theory can explain why fee discounting is lower when larger audit firms compete for clients.