Do Audit Clients Successfully Engage in Opinion Shopping? Partner‐Level Evidence

This study investigates whether companies engage in audit opinion shopping activities by exerting influence over an audit firm's decision to switch the engagement partner (“partner‐level opinion shopping”) in the Chinese setting, where the identities of engagement partners are publicly disclosed. Adopting the empirical framework developed by Lennox [2000], we show evidence that companies successfully engage in partner‐level opinion shopping. Further, partner‐level opinion shopping is more likely to be successful if a company is economically important to an audit firm, and it is less likely to be successful if the audit firm is formed as a partnership rather than a corporation. We also find that companies successfully engaging in partner‐level opinion shopping exhibit significantly lower earnings quality. Finally, we directly compare audit records between incoming and outgoing partners and find that, for companies that successfully improve audit opinions after partner switching, incoming partners have a significantly higher propensity to issue clean opinions than their outgoing counterparts.     

An empirical investigation of analytical procedures using mixture distributions

Analytical procedures are evaluations of account and transaction flow information made by a study of plausible relationships between both accounting and non‐accounting data. This study investigates the performance of Tweedie distributions (which have Gaussian distributions as members) in improving fit of zero‐inflated, non‐negative, kurtotic and multimodal analytical review data. The study found that account valuations are more informative than marginal data in analytical review, that mixture Poisson–Gamma distributions offer better fit than Gaussian distributions, even under assumptions of central limit theorem convergence, and that mixture Poisson–Gamma distributions provide better predictions of future account and transaction volumes and values. Model performance improvement with price versus returns data in this empirical study was substantial: from less than one‐quarter of variance, to almost two‐thirds. Tweedie generalized linear model risk assessments were found to be a magnitude smaller than traditional risk assessments, lending support to market inefficiency and increased risk from idiosyncratic factors. An example with several differing distributions shows that use of mixture distributions instead of point estimation can reduce sample size while retaining the power of the audit tests. The results of this study are increasingly important as accounting datasets are growing exponentially larger over time, requiring well‐defined roles for models, algorithms, data and narrative which can only be achieved with statistical protocols and algorithmic languages.     

Explaining municipal audit costs in Sweden: Reconsidering the political environment,the municipal organisation and the audit market

With the purpose of explaining professional audit costs in Swedish municipalities, we hypothesised that audit costs are partly driven by various signalling and monitoring incentives in order to manage stakeholder relationships. Our model of the determinants of audit costs was tested on data from Swedish municipalities, thus extending the study of audit costs to political organisations in a Scandinavian institutional context. The test supported to some extent the traditional propositions of organisational complexity, risk and market determinants, as well as the proposition of the political environment. Our results indicate that audit costs are used to signal accountability, thereby suggesting that audit as a signal could be managed without managing professional auditors.     

The Unintended Consequences of the Frequency of PCAOB Inspection

After more than 50 years of self‐regulation of the US auditing profession, the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) as a quasi‐governmental entity with statutory authority to inspect accounting firms that audit public clients. The frequency of this inspection is annual or triennial, based upon the number of public clients the firm audits. We examine the effects of these two levels of inspection frequency on financial reporting quality and audit fees for clients of small and midsize public accounting firms. Our findings provide evidence of significantly higher audit quality and audit fees for clients of annually inspected firms relative to clients of triennially inspected firms. These findings are robust to auditor‐client alignment analyses, propensity score matching, time‐series analyses, examination of firms that have changed from triennial to annual inspection, and particular examination of firms with inspection deficiencies. Overall, our study suggests that the two‐tier frequency system of PCAOB inspection may have also resulted in two‐tier audit quality and audit fee systems for small and midsize public accounting firms, with more frequent inspection leading to more rigorous and informed auditor decisions. We discuss the implications of our results for the Board and the profession at large.     

构建以价值创造为导向的商业银行内部审计体系的初步设想

商业银行内部审计的重点和主要目的应随商业银行发展战略及商业银行经营管理模式的转换而转换。本文从落实商业银行可持续发展战略及保障商业银行内部治理目标实现等角度出发,提出未来我国商业银行内部审计的重点应是商业银行及其分支机构的价值创造力,内部审计的目的也在于促进商业银行及其分支机构不断提升自身的价值创造力。本文建议借鉴融合国际上计量价值创造力的主要方法,构建以价值创造为导向的涵盖财务、风险管理、客户、内部流程及员工学习成长等五个方面审计维度的商业银行内部审计体系。本文还就各审计维度的评价指标进行设计,并建议采用熵值赋权法进行指标赋权。     

企业集团统一审计能降低审计收费吗

审计收费是审计研究的重要问题。已有审计研究文献通常关注的是对单个公司的审计收费,本文则关注在同一实际控制人控制下的企业集团中,多家上市公司选择同一家会计师事务所审计,即集团统一审计对审计收费的影响。研究发现,集团统一审计不但不能降低审计收费,反而会增加审计收费;选择大所进行统一审计可以降低审计费用,而小所执行统一审计则可能存在牺牲独立性以获得更多审计收费的情形。此外,事务所尤其是小规模事务所,在招揽集团客户时存在激烈的低价竞争。     

会计师事务所人力资本特征与审计质量——来自中国资本市场的经验证据

人力资本在会计师事务所中具有十分重要的意义。本文利用2009年我国会计师事务所及其非金融类上市公司客户的数据,以操控性应计额度量审计质量,检验会计师事务所中注册会计师所占比重以及注册会计师的学历、年龄、参加行业领军人才培训情况等人力资本特征对审计质量的影响,结果发现,在我国本土事务所中,注册会计师的年龄以及入选行业领军人才培训计划的人数与正向的操控性应计额之间存在显著的负向关系,这表明,会计师事务所中注册会计师的经验丰富程度和对培训的重视程度对于抑制客户的正向盈余管理行为、提高审计质量具有积极作用。文章没有发现会计师事务所中注册会计师的比重以及注册会计师中高学历者所占比重与审计质量之间存在显著关系的证据。     

Audit opinion improvement and the timing of disclosure

Companies have been found to report positive information more quickly than they report negative information (i.e., good news early, bad news late). This paper investigates the potential impact of audit opinion change on the timeliness of financial disclosures, with improvements in audit opinion considered to be “good news.” We take both the direction and the magnitude of audit opinion change into consideration, with magnitude measuring how far the opinion is from an unqualified opinion (i.e., an unqualified opinion with explanatory paragraph is closer to an unqualified opinion than a qualified opinion is). We find that firms experiencing an improvement in their audit opinions disclose their financial results earlier, while those with audit opinion deteriorations report their financial results later, and that these effects were related to the magnitude of the opinion change. What's more, there is an asymmetric response to good audit opinion news vs. bad audit opinion news, with bad audit opinion news having a larger effect on earnings timeliness than the effect on earnings timeliness of good audit opinion news. Overall, our results support the “good news early, bad news late” notion. Finally, we also find that overall earnings timeliness has improved in China since the enactment of new reporting regulations in 2006.     

Public Attention and Auditor Behavior: The Case of Hurun Rich List in China

Adverse client publicity can entail regulatory scrutiny over audited financial statements and impose political costs on auditors. We use the changes in client publicity caused by their controlling owners’ presence on the Hurun Rich List (the rich listing) in China to test the hypothesis that auditor conservatism increases with client publicity. Our evidence indicates auditors issue more adverse audit opinions to clients and charge higher fees following the rich listing events. Moreover, we observe that auditors strategically respond to clients with different attributes—for clients whose owners accumulated wealth in a more questionable manner, auditors choose more stringent audit reporting to better defend themselves from regulatory scrutiny; for clients without such attributes, auditors primarily rely on increasing audit fees to cope with any post-listing increase in audit risks. Our analyses also suggest the impacts of rich listings tend to be concentrated among large audit firms with stronger reputation concerns or among engagement auditors with more conservative reporting styles. By showing how auditors manage political risks associated with heightened public scrutiny, we contribute to both the auditing and political cost literature.     

审计费用的事前确定、异常审计费用与审计质量

实务中,我国部分上市公司年报审计费用采取事前确定方式,也就是在审计工作开展之前的董事会上确定。事前确定审计费用的动机何在,会产生什么样的审计后果?已有国内外文献尚缺乏这方面的研究。本文以2008～2017年全部A股上市公司为样本,通过实证考察审计费用事前确定方式对异常审计费用以及审计质量的影响发现:基于低价揽客或折价维持客户的经济动因,事前确定的审计费用显著偏低。进一步研究表明,在事前确定审计费用方式下,客户的审计质量更低。本文研究丰富和拓展了审计费用及审计质量决定因素的相关文献,同时也为监管机构规范审计费用确定方式提供了经验证据。