This study examines the association between measures of earnings quality and auditor industry specialization. Prior work has examined the association between auditor brand name and earnings quality, ...using auditor brand name to proxy for audit quality. Recent work has hypothesized that auditor industry specialization also contributes to audit quality. Extending this literature, we compare the absolute level of discretionary accruals (DAC) and earnings response coefficients (ERC) of firms audited by industry specialists with those of firms not audited by industry specialists. We restrict our study to clients of Big 6 (and later Big 5) auditors to control for brand name. Because industry specialization is unobservable, we use multiple proxies for it. After controlling for variables established in prior work to be related to DAC and the ERC, we find clients of industry specialist auditors have lower DAC and higher ERC than clients of nonspecialist auditors. This finding is consistent with clients of industry specialists having higher earnings quality than clients of nonspecialists.
Accounting accruals are managers' subjective estimates of future outcomes and cannot, by definition, be objectively verified by auditors prior to occurrence. This causes audits of high‐accrual firms ...to pose more uncertainty than audits of low‐accrual firms because of potential estimation error and a greater chance that high‐accrual firms have undetected asset realization and/or going concern problems that are related to the high level of accruals. One way that auditors can compensate for this risk exposure is to lower their threshold for issuing modified audit reports, an action that will increase modified reports and, therefore, lessen the likelihood of failing to issue a modified report when appropriate. We call this auditor reporting conservatism and test if high‐accrual firms in the United States, are more likely to receive modified audit reports for asset realization uncertainties and going concern problems. Empirical results for a large sample of U.S. publicly listed companies support the hypothesis that auditors are more conservative, that is, more likely to issue both types of modified audit reports for high‐accrual firms. Further analyses show that income‐increasing accruals are somewhat more likely to result in reporting conservatism than income‐decreasing accruals, and that only the Big Six group of auditors show evidence of reporting conservatism. These findings add to our understanding of the audit report formation process and the potentially important role played by accounting accruals in that process.
We investigate the impact of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) first-time inspections of foreign accounting firms by examining abnormal accruals around the inspection year, and ...the value relevance of accounting numbers around the inspection report date, for their U.S. cross-listed clients. We document lower abnormal accruals in the post-inspection period, and greater value relevance of accounting numbers in the post-report period for clients of the inspected auditors, compared with non-cross-listed clients or clients of noninspected auditors within the inspected countries. Comparisons of the PCAOB's joint inspections with PCAOB stand-alone inspections indicate that while both experience lower post-inspection abnormal accruals, the former benefit more than the latter. The value relevance measure, in contrast, shows greater increases for the PCAOB stand-alone inspections than for joint inspections. Comparing the inspection effects for auditors with and without deficiency reports, we find no systematic differences for accruals or for value relevance.
Financial scandals such as the Enron-Andersen debacle provoke concerns that auditors lack independence when faced with influential clients. Unlike previous studies that examine whether client ...influence affects audit quality on ongoing engagements (providing mixed results), we investigate whether client influence (which engenders “independence risk”) at the audit-office level affects auditor resignations from high engagement-risk clients. We construct summary measures of engagement risk, using client disclosures on Form 8-K filings, potential risk factors (e.g., litigation risk), and auditor action (e.g., issuance of a going concern opinion) on the previous year’s financial statements. Focusing on risky clients, we find that auditors are more likely on average to resign from influential clients, and this positive association holds for auditors that are less likely to have mechanisms in place to mitigate independence risk. Also, importantly, influential clients are prevalent across the spectrum of client size, and the positive association between client influence and auditor resignations holds for both large and small clients.
SUMMARY
The PCAOB's audit-quality framework posits that superior inputs are essential for achieving high audit quality, and these inputs depend on the accounting firm's ability to recruit and retain ...quality personnel. However, the link between these inputs and audit quality has gone largely unexplored. We use employees' reviews of accounting firm employers from Glassdoor.com to examine perceptions of these inputs, and test whether accounting firms' internal characteristics explain employee satisfaction and audit quality. Our descriptive evidence suggests that “career opportunities,” “senior management,” and “culture and values” play a more important role in employees' satisfaction than do “compensation and benefits” or “work-life balance.” Although work-life balance is not among the most important factors that are associated with audit employees' job satisfaction, better work-life balance is nonetheless associated with higher audit quality. However, we do not find a significant association between audit-employees' job satisfaction and audit quality.
We examine the effects of city-level auditor industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing in the United States. Using a sample of Big N clients for the 2000–2007 period, and a scale ...measure based on percentile rankings of the number of audit clients at the city-industry level, we document significant specialization premiums and scale discounts in both the pre- and post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) periods. However, the effects of industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing are highly interactive. The negative effect of city-industry scale on audit fees obtains only for clients of specialist auditors. By contrast, clients of non-specialist auditors obtain scale discounts only when they enjoy strong bargaining power, suggesting that auditors are "forced" to pass on scale economies to clients with greater bargaining power.
Recent debates on audit committee financial expertise have focused on “accounting” and “nonaccounting” financial experts. A significant proportion of firms do not appoint accounting financial experts ...(i.e., persons with specialized accounting/auditing experience) to their audit committees. We examine the determinants of firms' choice of the “audit committee financial experts” for a sample of Fortune 1000 firms. We test the relation between the demand for accounting financial experts (AFEs), potential litigation risk, and corporate governance. We find that firms with higher litigation risk are more likely to have AFEs on their audit committee. However, the association between litigation risk and the likelihood of appointing accounting financial experts occurs for firms with relatively strong governance but not for those with weak governance. Thus, our findings indicate that (1) companies with demand for accounting financial experts—measured by potential litigation risk—seem to be able to secure accounting financial experts, but (2) such benefits only accrue in the presence of otherwise strong corporate governance.
Purpose
The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 exempts small, non-accelerated filers from compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) Section 404b internal control audits. However, these firms are required to ...comply with other internal control regulations, namely, SOX Sections 302 and 404a, starting in 2002 and 2007, respectively. A small number of these firms also voluntarily adopted (and sometimes dropped) Section 404b during 2004-2010. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of a series of internal control regulations introduced by SOX on the financial reporting quality of small firms.
Design/methodology/approach
The research design for this study is empirical. Using unsigned and signed discretionary accruals as measures of financial reporting quality, the authors compare the financial reporting quality for adopters and non-adopters across four regulation regimes over the period 2000-2010: PRESOX, SOX 302, SOX 404a and SOX 404b.
Findings
The results indicate that most of the adopters and non-adopters benefited from SOX 302 and 404a compared with the PRESOX period. However, only the non-adopters gained incrementally when moving from SOX 302 to SOX 404a. Also, Section 404b benefited firms with material weaknesses, as well as firms without material weaknesses that had the lowest reporting quality, in the PRESOX period.
Research limitations/implications
This study helps inform the important policy debate on whether to increase the threshold that is used for the SOX 404b exemption. It shows incremental benefits for firms that adopted Section 404b audits, even when they were complying with Section 302 and Section 404a. Consequently, extending the exemption to more companies would result in a loss of the reporting quality benefit of 404b.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by focusing exclusively on non-accelerated filers and by examining differences across four regulation regimes over a long window compared to prior studies. It provides evidence that the financial reporting benefit of SOX 404b is not transitional, but rather extends for a few years even after some firms discontinued the 404b audits.
Going Concern Opinion and Cost of Equity Amin, Keval; Krishnan, Jagan; Yang, Joon Sun
Auditing : a journal of practice and theory,
11/2014, Volume:
33, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Prior studies document a negative market reaction to going concern opinions. We extend this literature by focusing on the link between the going concern opinion and the cost of equity capital. Using ...two different samples (one comprising distressed firms and the other matched on propensity score), we document a significant positive association between the issuance of the going concern opinion and the firm's subsequent cost of equity capital. This result is robust to sensitivity tests using various subsamples, time periods, and multiple methods for computing the cost of equity capital. We also examine the association between changes in the audit opinion (going concern to clean opinion and vice versa) and subsequent changes in cost of equity. We find that the cost of equity increases between 3.3 percent and 5.7 percent for firms that receive a first-time going concern opinion. This evidence illuminates the relevance of going concern opinions and the value of the information embedded in them.
