Artikel Burke et al. (2019)
11 important questions on Artikel Burke et al. (2019)
What is the effect of partner identification on audit quality?
- Partner identification will increase partner accountability. This should motivate auditors to increase effort and deliver higher quality audits.
- Partner identification will increase transparency. This allows stakeholders to track a partner's negative regulatory and legal outcomes which should motivate auditors to alter their behavior.
Arguments audit firms:
- Auditors are already kept accountable (e.g. Peer reviews, potential inspection and regulatory sanctions)
- Partner identification could cause inefficiencies. It could mean that auditors would do more and unnecessary audit procedures which would cause higher audit fees and more audit delays.
What is the effect of audit partner identification on audit pricing?
Audit firms state that they have to compensate for additional risk and unnecessary procedures which will result in higher audit fees.
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What is the effect of audit partner identification on audit delays?
What is the third hypothesis?
Which companies are investigated and why?
These companies differ in terms of:
- Investment in training and audit methodologies
- Internal quality control systems
- Workload distribution among employees
- Big 4 firms may experience greater risk due to scrutiny by external parties such as media, analysts, creditors and investors.
Big 4 firms are already motivated to deliver optimal audit quality. Therefore, new regulation could cause inefficiencies such as increased fees and/or delays.
Non-Big 4 could be motivated to increase audit effort.
The authors also examine the effect of partner characteristics on audit quality, audit fees and audit delay. Which are they?
- Gender: they argue that men and women are different in term of risk tolerance, diligence, conservatism, etc.
- Busyness: the effect of workload
- Education: knowledge and skills
- Social connections: possible source of information advantage
What are the results of partner identification on audit quality?
What are the results of partner identification on audit fees?
For the non-Big4, there is no increase in quality. The increase in audit fees can be explained by the increase in liability concerns, this is then priced into the audit.
What are the results of partner identification on audit delay?
What are the results of partner characteristics on the audit?
- Audits by female partner are more expensive
- Busy auditors are cheaper. This could be due to that busy auditors audit more clients but smaller clients
- Audits conducted by partners which have more social connections are more expensive but that these audits experience fewer delays. It is possible that social connection bring informational advantages about the clients resulting in smoother audits.
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