Audit quality and the going-concern decision-making process: Spanish evidence

In this study, we attempt empirically to investigate the relationship between audit quality and the probability that a financially distressed company would receive a going-concern opinion. Auditor decision-making in the presence of going-concern uncertainties may be characterized as a two-stage process. The first stage is the identification of a potential going-concern problem and the second stage is to determine whether the particular company should receive a qualified going-concern opinion. A sample of 1,199 non-financial Spanish company-years has been obtained from the database issued by the Stock Exchange National Commission for the fiscal years ending between December 1991 and December…