“厦门大学会计学科教师与研究生系列Seminar”之三十二

题  目：Effort Allocation in Integrated Audits and Its Impact on Financial Reporting Quality

报告人：刘馨茗 助理教授

主持人：张国清 教授

时  间：2018年5月29日（星期二）,15:00-17:30

地  点：厦门大学嘉庚二203室

论文摘要：China’s 2012 Rule mandates that listed firms should disclose their internal control (IC) audit fees in the annual reports. Using abnormal audit fees to proxy for over- or under-investment in audit effort, China's new rule provides a unique setting in which we can distinguish auditor's effort allocation in an integrated audit. This study examines whether IC over-reliance exists and whether this over-reliance leads to lower quality of financial statement (FS) audits. An IC over-reliance exists if auditors' over-invested effort in IC audits cannot actually help them detect IC weaknesses (ICW). Because the auditors mistakenly believe that over-investment in IC audits can detect more ICW, they will under-estimate firms' control risk, resulting in reduced substantive testing and lower FS audit quality. Based on a sample of 4,075 firm-year observations from the A-share companies listed on China’s stock exchanges during 2012-2016, we show that IC over-reliance exists and harms financial reporting quality when auditors charge positive abnormal IC audit fees and negative abnormal financial statement audit fees. However, this negative effect of IC over-reliance is mitigated when the auditors are IC industry experts. These results are robust to controlling for endogeneity, alternative measures of FS audit quality and abnormal audit fees, deleting observations with small abnormal IC and FS audit fees, and validity test of the effort over-/under-investment classifications. Our empirical results bear important implications to recent regulations and standards.