提高我国注册会计师审计独立性的对策探讨

注册会计师只有在审计过程中真正做到客观独立,才能保证审计信息的可信性,从而树立起职业声誉,体现其社会价值.提高我国注册会计师审计独立性应从完善注册会计师的委托聘约机制、明确注册会计师的法律责任、规范会计师事务所的组织形式、提高注册会计师的自身素质、健全注册会计师的外部监管机制、优化执业环境等方面入手.     

The effect of mandatory auditor assignment and non-audit service on audit fees: Evidence from Korea

In Korea, regulators could assign auditors to firms. We investigate the relationship among audit fees, mandatory auditor assignment, and the joint provision of non-audit and auditor services in Korea. We find that assigned auditors charge significantly higher audit fees than freely selected auditors. We also find that the joint provision of non-audit and audit services does intensify the relation between auditor assignment and audit fees. Combined with the results of other studies that have shown that firms audited by assigned auditors report smaller amounts of discretionary accruals than firms audited by freely selected auditors, our results suggest the possibility that mandatory auditor assignment may improve auditor independence.     

Zombie Board: Board Tenure and Firm Performance

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on‐the‐job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum level in the cross‐section are associated with negative (positive) announcement returns. The quality of corporate decisions also follows an inverted U‐shaped pattern in a sample of firms affected by the death of a director.     

Audit Firm Tenure and Audit Quality in a Constrained Market

We examine the relation between audit quality and audit firm tenure in the Iranian audit market, which is constrained by government policies that create intense competition for clients among many small audit firms. We develop arguments that these circumstances create cost pressures that entrench low audit quality and render auditors' plans more predictable to managers wishing to misstate their accounts. Using publicly available data for the audits of listed companies in Iran prior to mandatory audit firm rotation and the incidence of misstated financial reports identified by the Iranian Association of Certified Public Accountants Inspection Office, we find that the likelihood of a misstatement is lowest in the first two years of audit firm tenure. We also find that the likelihood of misstatement is not associated with the year preceding a mandatory audit firm rotation, suggesting outgoing auditor effort is not sensitive to the prospect of subsequent revelations of deficiencies. Although our results from a pre-mandatory rotation period show that frequent rotations appear to improve the financial reporting quality in our sample, we are wary of interpreting these results as support for the mandatory audit firm rotation policy in Iran. Rather, we suggest this is a peculiar consequence of deficiencies in audit quality inherent in the Iranian market.     

An international study of internal audit function quality

We investigate organisational and environmental factors that influence firms’ incentives to develop high-quality internal audit functions (IAFs) by using a unique international sample formed by matching proprietary data from a global internal auditor survey with public data obtained from Worldscope. Concerning organisational factors, we find that a positive relationship exists between IAF quality and firm complexity and confirm that complex firms have a higher demand for monitoring and advising and, therefore, a greater need for formal controls. In addition, IAF quality is positively related to board monitoring and audit committee diligence but negatively associated with CEO power, which suggests that IAF quality is influenced by other key players in corporate governance. Regarding environmental factors, we document that IAF quality is positively associated with industry competition, which implies that a firm’s incentive for a high-quality IAF is enhanced when confronted with greater environmental uncertainty. Furthermore, IAF quality has a significantly positive relationship with our self-constructed index of IAF requirements included in national corporate governance codes, which indicates that strong home-country corporate governance codes play a role in fostering IAF development.     

Board governance and corporate performance

We examine the link between the monitoring capacity of the board and corporate performance of UK listed firms. We also investigate how firms use the flexibility offered by the voluntary governance regime to make governance choices. We find a strong positive association between the board governance index we construct and firm operating performance. Our results imply that adherence to the board‐related recommendations of the UK Corporate Governance Code strengthens the board's monitoring capacity, potentially helping mitigate agency problems, but that investors do not value it correspondingly. Moreover, in contrast to prior UK findings suggesting efficient adoption of Code recommendations, we find that firms at times use the Code flexibility opportunistically, aiming to decrease the monitoring capacity of the board, which is followed by subsequent underperformance. This finding questions the effectiveness of the voluntary approach to governance regulation followed in the UK and in many countries around the world.     

Responsiveness of Auditors to the Audit Risk Standards: Unique Evidence from Big 4 Audit Firms

We examine the effect of changes in audit risk standards on the conduct of financial statement audits in a European setting. We investigate this by analysing the audit hours and audit fees for clients of Big 4 audit firms in Finland in 1996 and 2010. Our results show that audit firms became more sensitive to clients’ business risk due to the introduction of the new audit risk standards, with more audit hours allocated to owner-managed companies in 2010 than in 1996, and fewer audit hours allocated to low-risk clients in 2010 than in 1996. Also, the labour mix in the audit team changed for owner-managed companies, with a greater work load carried by junior auditors in 2010 than in 1996. Regarding the price of audit, we find an increase in audit fees for clients with high business risk, while audit fees remained at roughly the same level for low-risk clients. These findings should be of interest to the auditing profession and those involved in the development of auditing regulations.     

Annual report readability and corporate agency costs

Annual reports are the main sources of information for outside investors’ investment decisions and enable shareholders to supervise the management. Difficulties with the readability of these reports may therefore have serious consequences. Using 19,221 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2001 to 2015, we investigate the association between annual report readability and corporate agency costs, where readability is proxied by report file length and/or file size. We find that firms with better annual report readability experience lower agency costs, and the negative association between readability and agency costs is more pronounced in firms with higher external audit quality, internal control quality or analyst coverage. These results hold after several robustness checks. The positive effect of annual report readability is stronger in private firms than in state-owned enterprises, and becomes stronger after the implementation of new accounting standards in 2007. Readable annual reports can help in monitoring corporate insiders’ opportunistic behavior and thus reduce agency costs.     

Shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales in the valuation of the firm and its assets

This paper presents a simple framework for the valuation of compound options within shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales. The shadow cost includes two components. The first component is the product of pure information cost due to imperfect knowledge and heterogeneous expectations. The second component represents the additional cost caused by the short-selling constraint. Information costs are linked to Merton's (1987. Journal of Finance 42, 510) model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information, CAPMI. This model is extended by Wu et al. (1996. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 7, 136) who propose an incomplete-information capital market equilibrium with heterogeneous expectations and short sale restrictions, GCAPM. This model is used in our paper to provide for the first time in the literature analytic solutions for derivatives in the presence of both shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales.When deriving the compound call option formula, we consider a call option on a stock, which is itself an option on the assets of the firm. Our methodology incorporates shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales on the firm's assets as well as the effects of leverage in the capital structure. The formula can be useful in the valuation of several corporate liabilities in the presence of information uncertainty and short sales constraints about the firm and its cash flows. Our analysis can be used for the valuation of several real options.     

推行精细化管理 提高内部审计效能

全面推行工程项目精细化管理,对于建筑施工企业的发展具有重大的意义,随着精细化管理逐步展开,对内部审计工作也提出了更为严格的要求。