The Accuracy and Incremental Information Content of Audit Reports in Predicting Bankruptcy

A series of corporate failures in which auditors failed to warn about impending bankruptcy led to widespread criticism of the UK auditing profession during the last recession. For a sample of 976 quoted companies (1987–94), this paper shows that there are two reasons why audit reports were not accurate or informative indicators of bankruptcy. First, audit reports poorly reflected publicly available information about the probability of bankruptcy. Secondly, strong persistence in audit reporting reduced the accuracy of audit reports