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Purpose: This paper aims to examine the perspectives of auditors, regulators and financial report preparers on the effects of key audit matters (KAMs) reporting on audit effort, fees, quality and report transparency. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (13 Audit Partners, 5 Chief Financial Officers and 3 regulators) and thematically analysed the interviews. They use the frame of "Paradox of Transparency" to explain the findings. Findings: Auditors perceive that the overall quality control of their audits has improved both in the planning and execution stages, and such improvement can mostly be attributed to the coercive pressures from professional bodies and regulators. Nevertheless, audit fee remains unchanged. Auditors disclose industry generic items and descriptions of KAMs, sometimes masking the real problem areas of the clients. Even after improving the performative audit quality, transparency of audit reporting has not improved. Issues that warrant going concern qualifications or audit report modifications are now reported as KAMs. Hence, KAMs reporting might make the audit report less transparent. Practical implications: Localised audit environments and institutions affect the transparency of KAMs reporting. Without attention to corporate governance and auditors' independence issues, paradoxically, performative improvement in audit quality (due to the KAMs reporting requirement) does not enhance the transparency of audit reports. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to provide field-level evidence in Bangladesh and other developing countries about the perceptions of auditors, financial report preparers and regulators on the effects of KAMs reporting on audit efforts, fees, quality and report transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether delays in the expected release of annual earnings have implications for the future auditor-client relationship. Managers have strong incentives to release earnings on schedule, and auditors play an important role in helping their clients avoid costly earnings announcement delays. We find an increased likelihood of subsequent auditor-client realignments after earnings announcement delays. We further find that clients changing auditors realign with audit firms that better meet their earnings announcement timing demands, without finding evidence of a significant compromise in the reliability of the financial statement numbers in the earnings announcement. Our results help inform regulatory concerns about audit market concentration and how audit firm turnover has the potential to impact the auditor-client dynamic. While it is possible that auditor turnover could lead to a power imbalance where clients gain leverage in the relationship, our results suggest otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audit fees are deemed as one of the factors that might influence the perceptions of public toward external auditors. The problem statement concentrated if there is a significant relationship between audit fees and audit quality through the mediators: total assets, origin of company, audit-firm size, complexity of operation in a company and auditor industry based on the perceptions of the external auditors. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the perceptions of external auditors on the relationship between audit fees and audit quality. A survey questionnaire contains 18 items distributed to 90 external auditors, 73 were returned yielding 81% responses rate. Descriptive analysis and hierarchical regression were used to analyze data and test the hypotheses. The study revealed that there is insignificant relationship between audit fees and audit quality in case there is no mediators. Moreover, results revealed that after using five mediators (total assets, origin of a company, audit firm-size, complexity of operations, auditor industry) there is a significant relationship on the relationship between audit fees and audit quality in terms of audit firm-size as a mediator. In contrast, the study found that there are insignificant relationships between audit fees and audit quality in terms of the other mediators such total assets, origin of a company, complexity of operations, auditor industry. The results showed the audited companies/clients in Jordan are affected of the halo of big-4 audit firms regardless the factors that might play a big role in enhancing the quality of audit process.

Prior research suggests that corporate corruption culture captures an audit client's general attitude towards opportunistic behavior. In this paper, we examine whether the relation between client corruption culture and audit quality is attenuated or exacerbated by the competitive position of the incumbent auditor in the local audit market. We find that the incumbent auditor's weak competitive position in the local audit market exacerbates the negative effects of client corruption culture on audit quality. By the same token, we show that the incumbent auditor's strong competitive position in the local audit market attenuates the adverse audit quality effects associated with client corruption culture. Our findings speak to the interplay between client corruption culture and the competitive position of the incumbent auditor in US local audit markets and is of potential interest to regulators concerned about the impact of client corruption culture and audit market competition on audit quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document 45 specific allegations related to audit deficiencies based on GAAS, as detailed in 141 AAERs and 153 securities class action lawsuits over the violation years 1978–2016. Next, we use these allegations to validate popular proxies of audit quality. Of all the audit quality proxies, we find that restatements consistently predict all of the top six most cited audit deficiencies. The ratio of audit fees to total fees and the presence of a city specialist auditor predict five of the most cited deficiencies. Overall, our results suggest that the predictive power of audit quality proxies depends on (i) the settings that researchers are interested in and (ii) the specific audit deficiencies hypothesized to matter in the investigated setting. For instance, future studies related to auditor independence might consider using restatements and the ratio of audit fees to total fees as proxies of audit quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the impact of non-audit services (NAS) on audit quality. It is motivated by the new re-strictions on the joint provision of audit and NAS for EU Member State (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy 2016, Regulation 2014, EC 2011) which are based on concerns that auditors' provided NAS may impair auditor independence. Empirical evidence in Germany as well as in other Continental European countries is limited. We use a sample of 2567 firm-year observations from German listed firms between 2006 and 2013 and test the association between the level and type of non-audit service fees (NAS fees) paid to the auditor and audit quality. Earnings management is used as a proxy for audit quality. The findings indicate that the higher levels of NAS fees negatively affect audit quality. Separating different types of NAS shows that especially other assurance and other consultancy services have a negative impact on audit quality, whereas the level of tax services has no impact on audit quality. In further tests we show that cap on NAS fees at 70% of averaged three prior years audit fees imposed by the EU fails to prevent an impairment of audit quality, but that a moderate level of NAS does not result in lower audit quality compared to audit quality of auditors providing no NAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effects of disclosing the audit engagement partner's identity on individual and partnership incentives and overall audit quality. We model a collective decision problem, incorporating individual engagement partners' preferences with the partnership's choice of internal quality control. In our model, disclosure of the individual engagement partner (on Form AP) influences the probability that clients observe individual partners' past performance. While Form AP disclosure increases individual partners' incentives to provide high-quality audits for a given level of internal quality control within the partnership, it may simultaneously decrease the partnership's incentives to maintain good internal quality control systems, leading to a net degradation in audit quality. Our paper also demonstrates that the level of external audit oversight is critical in determining whether Form AP disclosure enhances audit quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether audit market structure affects audit quality and audit pricing. We analyze two conceptually distinct dimensions of market structure: audit market concentration and client mobility. Focusing on the private‐client segment of the Belgian audit market, we compare the pricing and quality effects of market structure between the segment of small and medium‐sized (SME) clients and the segment of large clients to test how audit complexity moderates such effects. We find that market concentration impairs price and quality competition in the SME‐client segment. Market concentration is unrelated to audit quality in the large‐client segment, where we argue that concentration is endogenous to audit complexity. Furthermore, we find that client mobility stimulates price competition in both segments but improves audit quality only in the large‐client segment. We interpret our findings as evidence that (a) audit market concentration impairs competition especially when audits have low complexity and that (b) the large‐client market segment, characterized by higher audit complexity and higher market concentration, can also be price and quality competitive if clients are sufficiently mobile, and change auditors relatively frequently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely held assumption in policy making and empirical research is that increasing the strength of public enforcement improves financial reporting quality and audit quality. This paper provides a more nuanced view. In a model with a manager who can manage earnings, a strategic auditor, and an enforcement institution, we show that enforcement and auditing are complements in a weak enforcement regime but can be substitutes in a strong regime. Although stronger enforcement always mitigates earnings management, the effects of different instruments of strengthening enforcement are ambiguous. We show that they can improve or impair financial reporting quality and audit quality, depending on production risk, accounting system characteristics, and the scope of auditing relative to enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the GAO (Public accounting firms: mandated study on consolidation and competition. GAO, Washington, 2003; Audits of public companies: continued concentration in audit market for large public companies does not call for immediate action. GAO, Washington, 2008) and the US Treasury (Advisory committee on the auditing profession: final report, 2008. http://www.tres.gov/offices/domestic-finance/acap/docs/final-report.pdf) have implied that the Big 4 dominated US audit market lacks competition. More recently, the PCAOB has expressed a somewhat different concern, i.e., that because audit committees may be primarily interested in negotiating a lower audit fee (rather than championing higher audit quality) for their clients, fee competition in the US audit market could pressure the incumbent auditor to compromise on audit quality (Doty in Keynote address: the reliability, role and relevance of the audit: a turning point, 2011. www.pcaobus.org). We utilize the notion of counterfactual fees chargeable by auditors to assess fee competition and investigate competing views on the relation between fee competition among Big 4 auditors and audit quality in US local audit markets. To operationalize fee competition at the client-level in the context of each local audit market, we compute a separate counterfactual audit fee that would be charged by every other Big 4 auditor for that particular engagement and use the minima of the counterfactuals. We validate our audit fee competition metric by showing a positive relation with the incumbent auditor's switching risk. Collectively, our findings suggest that fee competition is useful as a mechanism for improving audit quality in the highly concentrated US audit market, albeit only in local audit markets where the incumbent auditor has below-median market power and only for higher quality clients. Overall, our findings speak to the interplay between fee competition and auditor incentives and are of potential interest to regulators such as the PCAOB concerned about competition in US audit markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relation between audit personnel salaries and office-level audit quality. We measure audit personnel salaries at the associate, senior, and manager ranks for Big 4 audit offices from 2004 to 2013, using unique individual-auditor-level data obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor. We find that offices that pay lower salaries have a higher percentage of clients that experience restatements. In related analyses, we also find lower levels of audit quality when audit employees are paid less, relative to other lines of service in accounting firms. Finally, we document positive and significant associations between salary and fees, suggesting that audit offices pass some of the cost of higher labor onto their clients. Overall, our findings provide important initial evidence on the role of audit salary and its relation to audit quality and audit fees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by concerns that one of the reasons for the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is poor quality auditing, this study examines the accuracy of going concern modifications for a sample of United States (U.S.) companies in the pre-GFC (2005–2006), GFC (2007–2008), and post-GFC (2009–2010) periods. The results show that the type I misclassification is lower during the GFC but not different in the post-GFC period compared with the pre-GFC period. The type II misclassification is not significantly different in the GFC and post-GFC periods compared with the pre-GFC period. Additionally, the results suggest that non-Big 4 auditors, compared with Big 4 auditors, have become more conservative on clients’ going concern problems in the post-GFC period, which reduces their type II misclassification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]