Search results for "Joint audit"
showing 10 items of 30 documents
Struggle over joint audit: on behalf of public interest?
2012
International audience; European Commission (EC 2011) has recently suggested joint audit - broadly defined as an audit where two independent auditors are jointly liable for the audit report - as a way a way to increase audit quality after the financial crisis and to mitigate audit market concentration, by enlarging the audit offer. Big 4 audit firms have fought this proposal by arguing its unbearable cost while 2nd Tier audit firms have supported it by arguing its added quality. This conflicting position leads us to question their claim of public interest concern. As group-interest economic regulation theories predict that the absence of any effect of a new regulation (here: joint audit) is…
The Impact of Audit Committee Characteristics on the Enhancement of the Quality of Financial Reporting: an empirical study in the Spanish context
2007
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the likelihood that a company will receive a qualified audit report (as a measure of the quality of financial information) and the existence and characteristics of the audit committee (AC). For listed companies that voluntarily created an AC in the period following the publication in 1998 of the Spanish Code of Corporate Governance, known as the Olivencia Code, we find that ACs size, the percentage of independent members in ACs, company size, losses reported in either or both of the previous two years, receiving the same qualified audit opinion as in the previous year and ownership concentration affect the likelihood of receiv…
The Role of Internal Audit in Fraud Prevention and Detection
2014
Abstract This article aims to not just briefly describe the role of the internal audit in the detection of possible frauds, but also to highlight its importance in preventing the commission of frauds in any economic entity. Moreover, the analysis intends to especially point out the advantages that an internal audit can offer to the management of an economic entity and its partners, and to the society as a whole as well. Starting from the premise that auditors are not the adversaries of an entity, one should remember that: the internal audit is a function of assistance offered to the leadership of that entity in order for them to better manage their activities; it expresses judgments on all …
Internal Public Audit in the Financial Crisis Context
2013
Abstract The financial crisis effects have left their mark on the area of internal audit, but the attention on the responsibility that internal auditors could have in preventing the onset of such a crisis is quite low. Audit plays a vital role in the entities functioning by contributing to economic credibility. In this paper we have presented the role and objectives of internal audit, the organization and activity of internal audit in local government in Romania, the outsourced system and how it helped in preventing and/or managing the economic downturn.
Joint Audit, Audit Market Structure, and Consumer Surplus
2017
We use a structural application of the discrete choice model to investigate how the introduction of a joint audit policy would affect audit market structure and consumer surplus. We perform this policy evaluation by identifying demand fundamentals in a joint audit regime and applying them to a single audit regime. We find that a joint audit requirement has the potential to change the audit market structure substantially but that the effects are sensitive to the specific policy design. For example, small audit firms gain market share in a joint audit regime but only if an equal sharing of the workload between the two joint auditors is not required. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that th…
Consequences of the Abandonment of Mandatory Joint Audit : An Empirical Study of Audit Costs and Audit Quality Effects
2016
Abstract This paper focuses on the unique Danish setting in examining the consequences of abandoning a mandatory joint audit regime. We study the effects on audit costs (measured by audit fees) and audit quality (measured by abnormal accruals) of the abandonment of the mandatory joint audit in Denmark in 2005. We perform our analysis on non-financial listed Danish companies for the 2002–2010 period. Our results show that a joint audit is associated with higher fees, but that the association between joint audit and abnormal accruals is insignificant. This suggests that the higher audit fees cannot be explained by higher audit quality. Our results are robust to alternative measurements of fee…
IFRS adoption and audit and non-audit fees: empirical evidence from Spanish listed companies
2015
We analyse trends in inflation-adjusted audit and non-audit fees from 2003 to 2009 with the aim of identifying the impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Spain, where (a) the shift from national to international accounting standards represented major changes and (b) the implementation process was conducted in 2005 for group accounts of listed companies and 2008 for the individual accounts. To that end, we build a well-tested audit and non-audit fee model based on 2003 and compare the actual with the predicted values had the accounting reforms not taken place. We report unexpected higher audit fees for the group accounts model in the years 2004, 2005 and 2006. A plau…
Nonaudit services provided by incumbent auditors and earnings management: Evidence of auditor independence from an EU country
2011
ABSTRACTThis paper examines whether the joint provision of audit and non-audit services undermines auditor independence by testing for an association between the provision of consulting services and auditor independence measured by discretionary accruals. For the most part, previous literature has studied the issue in countries with an Anglo-American business environment. This study analyzes the possible impairment of auditor independence in the context of a continental European Union country (Spain). A cross-sectional regression is estimated to test the relationship between non-audit fees and reporting quality. Based on publicly available information for Spanish listed companies, the evide…
Audit quality and the going-concern decision-making process: Spanish evidence
2004
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…
Beyond the audit expectations gap
1992
In seeking to encourage a broader, European dimension to research on auditing and audit expectations, this paper examines the recent history of auditing and its regulation in Spain within the context of international developments in the accounting profession. The more expansive role being assigned to the audit function in Spain following the implementation of the Fourth and Eighth European Company Law Directives is generally viewed by Spanish writers as a progressive step, with largely positive effects. Such views stand in some contrast to the history of auditing in Britain, where the prevalence of an ‘audit expectations gap’ suggests a rather more problematic state of affairs. In exploring…