Does the Identity of Engagement Partners Matter? An Analysis of Audit Partner Reporting Decisions

This study examines the persistence and economic consequences of variations in reporting style across audit partners in individual engagements. Our results show that both aggressive and conservative audit reporting, measured by the pattern of prior Type 2 and Type 1 audit reporting error rates in auditor‐specific clienteles, persist over time and extend to other clients of the same partner. Analyses of abnormal accruals and persistence of client firms’ accrual estimates corroborate this finding, and hold both for private and publicly listed companies. Further, our results also show that the market penalizes client firms susceptible to aggressive audit partner reporting decisions. In particular, we find that our proxies for aggressive audit reporting are related to higher interest rates, worse credit ratings and less favorable forecasts of insolvency for private client companies, and a lower Tobin's Q for publicly listed client companies. Collectively, these results imply that audit partner aggressive or conservative reporting is a systematic audit partner attribute and not randomly distributed across engagements.     

Market Structure and Audit Fees: A Local Analysis*

This study conducts a local analysis of the relation between market structure and audit fees. The research question of interest to us is how audit fees are determined by each practicing local office, after taking into account the auditor's own position in a local market and the influence exerted by his or her clients. Appealing to the economic theories of monopoly and monopsony power, we hypothesize a positive audit fee‐concentration relation, and a negative audit fee‐client influence relation. Results indicate that auditor market concentration is positively associated with the non‐Big 6 audit fees but is unrelated to the Big 6 audit fees. Evidence is mixed concerning the client influence hypothesis. When this construct is proxied by the number of rival auditors operating within a geographic area centered on the municipality, the prediction of negative audit fee‐client influence relation is strongly supported for both groups of auditors. Results are much weaker using measures developed based on the relative importance of a municipal client to its auditor's audit portfolio. The issues addressed in this study are important at a time when the Canadian municipal sector is undergoing major changes because of municipal amalgamation, altering the underlying market structure for audit services and the bargaining position of a municipality vis‐Ã‐vis its auditor. More broadly speaking, our analysis implies that when assessing an auditor's report for signs of client pressure, the professional oversight bodies and regulatory authorities need to consider the relative, rather than the absolute, bargaining position of the client in question.     

The Influence of Nonaudit Service Revenues and Client Pressure on External Auditors' Decisions to Rely on Internal Audit*

This paper investigates how external auditor provision of significant nonaudit services and client pressure to use the work of internal audit influence external auditors' use of internal auditors' work. More specifically, we study how external audit evidence gathering choices are influenced by nonaudit fees and client pressure. Our research is motivated by an observation that the magnitude of nonaudit services provided to audit clients introduces the risk that client management may leverage its position with the external auditor and potentially affect the audit process. We address this issue by extending prior research and focusing on the importance of various explanatory variables, including nonaudit service revenues, client pressure, internal audit quality, and coordination, to the external auditor's decision to rely on the work of internal audit. We use data primarily obtained through surveys completed by internal and external auditors. The survey responses represent 74 separate audit engagements. Our findings reveal that when significant nonaudit services are not provided to a client, internal audit quality and the level of internal‐external auditor coordination positively affect auditors' internal audit reliance decisions. However, when the auditor provides significant nonaudit services to the client, internal audit quality and the extent of internal ‐ external auditor coordination do not significantly affect auditors' reliance decisions. Furthermore, when significant nonaudit services are provided, client pressure significantly increases the extent of internal audit reliance. Thus, external auditors appear to be more affected by client pressure and less concerned about internal audit quality and coordination when making internal audit reliance decisions at clients for whom significant nonaudit services are also provided.     

Audit Office Reputation Shocks from Gains and Losses of Major Industry Clients

Our study reports evidence on the dynamic effects of client switches on auditor reputations and fee premia. Offices of large accounting firms that lose (gain) major industry clients experience a reputation shock leading to more same‐industry client losses (gains) over the next two years. There is also a shift in audit fees charged to other same‐industry clients when a major client loss (gain) results in an audit office losing (gaining) city‐level industry leadership. A major client loss or gain also creates a short‐term capacity shock to an audit office's ability to supply high‐quality audits. However, there is no evidence of reputation spillovers to other‐industry clients in the audit office, or to clients in other offices of the accounting firm.     

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.     

Who Cares about Auditor Reputation?*

I provide evidence on the demand for auditor reputation by examining the defections of Arthur Andersen LLP's clients following the accounting scandals and criminal conviction marring the auditor's reputation in 2002. About 95 percent of clients in my sample did not switch auditors until after Andersen was indicted for criminal misconduct regarding its failed audit of Enron Corp. I test whether the timing of client defections and the choice of a new auditor are consistent with managers' incentives to mitigate potentially costly information and agency problems. I find that clients defected sooner, mostly to another Big 5 auditor, if they were more visible in the capital markets; such clients attracted more analysts and press coverage, had larger institutional ownership and share turnover, and raised more cash in recent security issues. However, my proxies for agency conflicts — managerial ownership and financial leverage — are not associated with the timing of defections or the choice of new auditor. Overall, my study suggests that firms more visible in the capital markets tend to be more concerned about engaging highly reputable auditors, consistent with such firms trying to build and preserve their own reputations for credible financial reporting.     

Evidence of Industry Scale Effects on Audit Hours,Billing Rates,and Pricing

Using a proprietary data set consisting of all private firm audit engagements in 2000 from one Big 4 firm in Belgium, we investigate (i) whether audit office industry scale is associated with a reduction of total, partner, and staff audit hours and thus with efficiency gains triggered by organizational learning from servicing more clients in an industry and (ii) whether the extent of efficiency pass‐on from the auditor to its clients depends on the audit firm's market power. We find that auditor office industry scale is associated with efficiency gains and a reduction of the variable costs (i.e., fewer total audit hours, partner hours, and staff hours), ceteris paribus. Our results also suggest that, on average, realized efficiencies are entirely passed on, as evidenced by a nonsignificant effect of auditor industry scale on the auditor's billing rate. Furthermore, we find that the extent of the efficiency pass‐on decreases with the market power of the audit firm in the industry market segment as we document a higher billing rate for auditors with high market power (versus low market power). In addition, we find that the lower audit hours associated with auditor industry scale do not compromise audit quality.     

Auditor Reputation,Auditor Independence,and the Stock‐Market Impact of Andersen's Indictment on Its Client Firms*

In this paper, we study a broad sample of Arthur Andersen clients and investigate whether the decline in Andersen's reputation, due to its criminal indictment on March 14, 2002, adversely affected the stock market's perception of its audit quality. Because these reputa‐tional concerns are more of an issue if an auditor's independence is impaired, we investigate the relationship between the abnormal market returns for Andersen clients around the time of the indictment announcement and several fee‐based measures of auditor independence. Our results suggest that when news about Andersen's indictment was released, the market reacted negatively to Andersen clients. More importantly, we find that the indictment period abnormal return is significantly more negative when the market perceived the auditor's independence to be threatened. We also examine the abnormal returns when firms announced the dismissal of Andersen as an auditor. Consistent with the audit quality explanation, we document that when firms quickly dismissed Andersen, the announcement returns are significantly higher when firms switched to a Big 4 auditor than when they either switched to non‐Big 4 auditors or did not announce the identity of the replacement auditor. Our empirical results support the notion that auditor reputation and independence have a material impact on perceived audit quality and the credibility of audited financial statements, and that the market prices this.     

What is the Relationship Between Audit Partner Busyness and Audit Quality?

Contemporaneous studies generally find a negative relationship between audit partner busyness (APB), measured as the number of clients in an audit partner's portfolio, and audit quality. Their argument is that a busy partner does not devote sufficient time to properly audit his average client. Contrary to these studies, we argue that when busyness is optimally chosen by the partner, in equilibrium, there is no causal relationship between APB and audit quality. Using Australian data for the 1999–2010 period, we show that APB is not reliably linked to audit quality, consistent with this equilibrium theory. We argue that causality can be ascribed to the APB‐audit quality relationship when accounting scandals exogenously shocked the Australian audit market during the 2002–04 period and APB likely deviated from optimum levels. Supporting this disequilibrium view, we find that higher APB reduces a partner's propensity to issue first‐time going‐concern opinions during this period. Our evidence highlights the importance of the equilibrium condition in testing empirical associations between audit outcomes and endogenous auditor attributes, and shows that the detrimental effect of APB on audit quality is not as pervasive as contemporaneous studies suggest.     

When Are Audit Firms Sued for Financial Reporting Failures and What Are the Lawsuit Outcomes?

We examine how often audit firms are sued in a large sample of accounting lawsuits that allege financial reporting failures. We find an insignificant relation between the likelihood of auditor litigation and restatements, but the likelihood of auditor litigation is strongly related to the types of alleged accounting deficiencies. We also find that the auditor's type influences the probability of the auditor being sued and the size of the payouts from auditor and nonauditor defendants. In particular, the Big N firms are approximately 7 percent less likely than non–Big N firms to be named as co-defendants, and the auditor's contribution to the plaintiff's payout is significantly larger when a Big N firm is sued. Overall, our findings suggest that auditors are rarely blamed when there are allegations of financial reporting failures, but the types of accounting deficiencies and the auditor's type significantly influence the probability of the audit firm being sued and the outcomes of the lawsuits.     

Implications of the Joint Provision of CSR Assurance and Financial Audit for Auditors' Assessment of Going-Concern Risk

We examine whether the joint provision of corporate social responsibility (CSR) assurance services and financial audit by the same audit firm influences auditors' assessment of going-concern risk. We predict that the provision of CSR assurance and financial audit by the same audit firm creates CSR-related knowledge spillovers from the CSR assurance team to the financial audit engagement team, which helps in the auditor's assessment of going-concern risk. Using more than 28,000 firm-year observations from 55 countries, we document that, relative to audit firms that provide only the financial audit, audit firms that provide both CSR assurance and financial audit for the same client (i) issue more frequent going-concern opinions and have lower Type II going-concern errors, (ii) have clients that book larger environmental and litigation provisions, (iii) report earnings that are more persistent and value-relevant and are less likely to book income-decreasing earnings restatements, and (iv) do not charge higher audit fees or total fees. Our results are important especially because of firms' increasing exposure to CSR risks and the growing number of countries that require assurance of CSR reports.     

When Is the Averaging Effect Present in Auditor Judgments?

Auditing standards task auditors with collecting sufficient appropriate evidence to form audit judgments. Yet, cognitive psychology documents a robust finding in which people evaluate a bundle of relevant, directionally consistent evidence as though averaging the strength of the components. In consequence, a bundle of evidence may be viewed as weaker evidence than the bundle's strongest evidence item alone. We experimentally examine whether this averaging effect occurs in an audit context, and we test a potential moderator. In three independent mini-cases, we ask auditor participants to make judgments about going concern, internal controls, and fraud risk. We present auditors with unfavorable audit evidence relevant to each judgment, manipulating whether we present a single strong evidence item or bundle it with a weaker evidence item. We also manipulate the auditor's initial impression of the client's state. We find that experienced auditors succumb to the averaging effect, making more strongly unfavorable judgments in response to the single evidence item than the bundle, and that this bias is reduced when the observed evidence is inconsistent with the auditor's initial impression. We interpret our results as consistent with the dual-processing theory of cognition.     

The Interrelation between Audit Quality and Managerial Reporting Choices and Its Effects on Financial Reporting Quality

Two distinct lines of research have been dedicated to empirically testing how financial reporting quality (measured as the earnings response coefficient or ERC) is associated with management's choice of reporting bias and with audit quality. However, researchers have yet to consider how ERCs are affected by either the auditor's reaction to changes in the manager's reporting bias or the manager's reaction to changes in audit quality. Our study provides theoretical guidance on these interrelations and how changes in the manager's or the auditor's incentives affect both reporting bias and audit quality. Specifically, when the manager's cost (benefit) of reporting bias increases (decreases), we find that expected bias decreases, inducing the auditor to react by reducing audit quality. Because we also find that the association between expected audit quality and ERCs is always positive, changes in managerial incentives for biased reporting lead to a positive association between ERCs and expected reporting bias. When the cost of auditing decreases or the cost of auditor liability increases, we find that expected audit quality increases, inducing the manager to react by decreasing reporting bias. In this case, changes in the costs of audit quality lead to a negative association between ERCs and expected reporting bias. Finally, we demonstrate the impact of our theoretical findings by focusing on the empirical observations documented in the extant literature on managerial ownership and accounting expertise on the audit committee. In light of our framework, we provide new interpretations of these empirical observations and new predictions for future research.     

Do Client Bankruptcies Preceded by Clean Audit Opinions Damage Auditor Reputation?*

There is a maintained assumption within the accounting literature that client bankruptcies preceded by clean audit opinions (Type II going concern opinion (GCO) errors) damage an auditor's reputation. Consistent with this view, the PCAOB proposes that stakeholders may use Type II GCO errors as indicators of low audit quality. This study examines audit committee and investor responses to Type II GCO errors. I find no evidence that audit offices with Type II GCOs are more likely to be dismissed, have lower subsequent audit fees, or have a lower likelihood of being selected for new audit engagements. These findings are consistent with audit committees not using Type II GCO errors as indicators of low auditor quality. Using event study analysis, I find evidence of modest incremental negative investor responses for clients of audit offices with Type II GCO errors. However, these negative investor responses are found only during the financial crisis period of 2008–2010 and are observed only within windows of 30 days or less. Given this limited evidence that stakeholders do respond to Type II GCO errors, I examine whether stakeholders should respond to Type II GCO errors. I find that audit office Type II GCO errors are positively associated with subsequent restatements, an established measure of low audit quality. Taking the results as a whole, I do not find that audit offices incur substantial reputational costs for Type II GCO errors. However, the negative investor response and the positive association with restatements provide some evidence that Type II GCO errors may serve as indicators of low audit quality.     

Growing Pains: Audit Quality and Office Growth

This study provides evidence on how local office growth affects audit quality. We predict that significant recent growth will temporarily stress office resources, leading to a negative relation between office‐level growth and audit quality. To test this prediction, we examine a sample of 17,062 firm‐year observations from 2005 to 2010. Results indicate a consistent negative relation between changes in volume of audit work and audit quality. Specifically, clients of offices that experience increases in workload over the prior year have greater absolute discretionary accruals as well as an increased likelihood of restatement. Our tests also indicate that the effect of office growth is transient and vanishes after one year. We find limited evidence that the size of the auditor's national network of offices partially mitigates the negative effects of office growth on audit quality. We further show that proxies for audit quality are negatively related to office‐level growth from new and existing clients. These findings are robust to controls for client and auditor characteristics as well as alternative specifications of growth. Taken together, evidence indicates that while larger offices provide higher audit quality, the benefits of office size are not realized immediately and rapid growth temporarily impairs audit quality. These results are informative to regulators concerned with audit quality and to practitioners charged with adjusting to office growth.     

Did Houston Clients of Arthur Andersen Recognize Publicly Available Bad News in a Timely Fashion?*

Despite the allegations of audit failure and the enormous publicity surrounding Arthur Andersen's indictment, there is no systematic empirical evidence on characteristics of accounting information of clients of Arthur Andersen vis‐à‐vis other Big 6 auditors. I examine whether earnings of Andersen's Houston‐based clients are timely in reporting bad news about future cash flows. I find that relative to a control group consisting of Houston‐based clients audited by other Big 6 auditors, earnings of Andersen clients are less timely in reporting bad news. Further, it appears that operating accruals of Andersen clients are less effective in accelerating the timely recognition of bad news than operating accruals of non‐Andersen clients. The findings suggest that the clients of Andersen's Houston office engaged in aggressive accounting practices, including delayed recognition of publicly available bad news.     

IQ and Audit Quality: Do Smarter Auditors Deliver Better Audits?

This study examines the role of an individual auditor's cognitive ability in delivering high‐quality audits. Our results from analyzing archival data from Sweden show that audit partners' IQ scores obtained from psychological tests are positively associated with going‐concern audit reporting accuracy and audit fee premiums. We also find some, albeit weak, evidence that audit partners' IQ scores are negatively associated with the income‐increasing abnormal accruals of the client. These results suggest that, although audit services are standardized through various control mechanisms and audits are conducted by teams rather than by individual auditors, the cognitive ability of audit partners responsible for an audit remains important in delivering high‐quality audit services.     

Do Investors Care about the Auditor's Economic Dependence on the Client?*

In this study, we investigate whether investor perceptions of the financial reporting credibility of Big 5 audits are related to the auditor's economic dependence on the client as measured by nonaudit as well as total (audit and nonaudit) fees paid to the incumbent auditor. We use the client‐specific ex ante cost of equity capital as a proxy for investor perceptions of financial reporting credibility and examine auditor fees both as a proportion of the revenues of the audit firm and as a proportion of the revenues of the audit firm's practice office through which the audit was conducted. Our findings suggest that both nonaudit and total fees are perceived negatively by investors' that is, the higher the fees paid to the auditor, the greater the implied threat to auditor independence, and the lower the financial reporting credibility of a Big 5 audit. Furthermore, our findings appear to be largely unrelated to corporate governance: investors do not perceive the auditor as compensating for weak governance. Separately, recent anecdotal evidence suggests that declining revenues from nonaudit services' as a result of recent regulatory restrictions” are being offset by substantial increases in audit fees. Other things being equal, rising audit fees imply higher profit margins for audit services, indicating that the audit function may no longer be a loss leader. Thus, to the extent that investors perceive total fees negatively, recent regulatory initiatives to limit nonaudit fees may not have adequately addressed the perceived, if not the actual, threat to auditor independence posed by fees.     

Auditor underreporting of time and moral reasoning: An experimental lab study*

Abstract. This paper introduces the theory of moral reasoning as a valid determinant of the underreporting of audit time. In an experimental lab design for a sample of 88 auditors from a national public accounting firm, actual underreporting on an audit task was observed. Findings show that underreporting is systematically related to the auditor's level of moral reasoning as measured by the Defining Issues Test (DIT). Here those with relatively low DIT scores were shown to underreport most severely. Results also show that although an unattainable time budget affects behavior, peer pressure has the most significant impact on underreporting. The present study makes three important contributions to the auditing and psychology literature. First, it establishes the significance of peer pressure as an antecedent to underreporting. Second, it shows that an auditor's moral reasoning explains actual underreporting behavior under conditions of work-related pressure. Third, it reveals marked underreporting under simulated audit conditions.     

A Bargaining Model of Auditor Reporting*

In this paper, I demonstrate that the quasi-rents earned in audits undermine an auditor's independence By considering the incentives of the auditor and the client and the interaction between them, I conclude that auditor will maintain his or her independence if the firm-specific quasi-rents are zero, but compromise his or her independence if the quasi-rents are positive. The extent of the compromise is an increasing function of the quasi-rents, since the auditor will propose that a higher value be reported in the financial statements when the quasi-rents increase. I also show that disputes between the auditor and the client increase as the scope for errors for an auditor's test increases. When the error scope is large, the client becomes more aggressive in preparing a proposal while the auditor becomes more cautious.