Auditor Fees, Abnormal Fees and Audit Quality Before and after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act PDF Download
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Author: Ariel J. Markelevich Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
Our study examines fees paid to auditors for audit and non-audit services during the period 2000 to 2003. We document a statistically significant positive association between audit fees and the absolute value of performance-adjusted discretionary accruals over all years. We also identify a significant positive association between non-audit fees and discretionary accruals in years 2000 and 2001, but no such association in later years (after passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). This lack of association in 2002 and 2003 may be a result of legislation that limits the types of non-auditing services that auditors can provide to audit clients. To address the potential impact of fee composition and client importance on auditor independence, we extend our empirical analysis by incorporating predictions of abnormal audit and non-audit fees. We derive abnormal fees using a fee estimation model drawn from prior literature. We find evidence consistent with the view that clients with higher abnormal fees are more apt to exert influence on their auditors, which in turn may lead to a breach in auditor independence. Overall, our results are most consistent with economic bonding being the primary determinant of auditor behavior.
Author: Ariel J. Markelevich Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
Our study examines fees paid to auditors for audit and non-audit services during the period 2000 to 2003. We document a statistically significant positive association between audit fees and the absolute value of performance-adjusted discretionary accruals over all years. We also identify a significant positive association between non-audit fees and discretionary accruals in years 2000 and 2001, but no such association in later years (after passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). This lack of association in 2002 and 2003 may be a result of legislation that limits the types of non-auditing services that auditors can provide to audit clients. To address the potential impact of fee composition and client importance on auditor independence, we extend our empirical analysis by incorporating predictions of abnormal audit and non-audit fees. We derive abnormal fees using a fee estimation model drawn from prior literature. We find evidence consistent with the view that clients with higher abnormal fees are more apt to exert influence on their auditors, which in turn may lead to a breach in auditor independence. Overall, our results are most consistent with economic bonding being the primary determinant of auditor behavior.
Author: Stephen R. Moehrle Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing ISBN: 1781907641 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Accounting scandals such as Enron and WorldCom ushered in several regulatory overhauls including Sarbanes-Oxley. This monograph summarizes and synthesize a decade of academic research to develop an evolving dominant explanation around these myriad changes.
Author: Aloke Ghosh Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 45
Book Description
We examine changes in fees paid to auditors around the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX, 2002). Audit fees are expected to increase after SOX due to both increased audit effort and potentially increased auditors' legal liability. Our results indicate an economically large increase in audit fees following the enactment of SOX. Controlling for size of the auditor, auditor's opinion, and client characteristics, we find that audit fee levels went up approximately 74 percent in the post-SOX period. In contrast, non-audit fees declined significantly over the same period. Total fees went up during this period because the increase in audit fees offset the decline in non-audit fees. Our conclusions remain unchanged when we use audit fee change regressions. Additionally, we find that the Big 4 audit firms increased audit fees by 42 percent more than their smaller counterparts. Further, we find that while small and large audit firms discount fees on initial engagements to attract new clients for the pre-SOX period, only small audit firms continue of offer fee discounts for the post-SOX years. Our results remain robust even after a battery of sensitivity analyses.
Author: Patrick Krauss Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 37
Book Description
This study investigates the economic auditor-client dependency issue by examining the association between abnormal audit fee pricing and audit quality. Our study is the first to analyze this phenomenon empirically for the institutional setting of German IFRS firms by using a sample of 2,334 firm-year observations for the period from 2005 to 2010. Our empirical results demonstrate that positive abnormal audit fees are negatively associated with audit quality and imply that the audit fee premium is a significant indicator of compromised auditor independence due to economic auditor-client bonding. Audit fee discounts generally do not lead to a reduced audit effort, or respectively, audit quality is not impaired when client bar-gaining power is strong. The association of positive abnormal audit fees and audit quality is robust to different audit quality surrogates such as absolute discretionary accruals, financial restatements, and meeting or beating analysts' earnings forecasts.
Author: Jeffrey Coulton Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 67
Book Description
We provide evidence that distinguishes between competing production cost-based explanations of how to interpret unusually high (or low) audit fees and their expected relation with accounting quality. Abnormally high or low fees are typically proxied by the residuals obtained from fee models. Whereas prior research assumes these residuals are independent from one year to the next, we argue that the inherent “stickiness” in audit fee residuals also means that measures of unexpected fees will be serially correlated. Our results strongly support this view, and suggest that audit fee residuals reflect a limitation of the standard audit fee model in capturing attributes of the auditing environment that are not well captured at the client-firm level. However, we also argue that the extent to which residual fees differ from the recent past can clarify their relation to accounting quality. We show that the “jump” in fee residuals relative to their long-run “sticky” average is strongly associated with lower accounting quality. Hence, a “jump” in fee residuals is a suitable proxy for lower accounting quality, as it likely reflects reactive auditor effort and/or an additional risk premium. We then show that long-run fee residuals are also negatively associated with subsequent accounting quality, a result which further contradicts the argument that higher abnormal audit fees capture increased proactive effort and therefore reflect “investments in auditing”. Overall, our results suggest that risk, rather than proactive effort, is a better explanation for higher than expected audit production costs.
Author: Jong-Hag Choi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 57
Book Description
Using a sample of 9,820 firm-year observations over the 2000-2003 period, this paper examines whether, and how, audit quality proxied by unsigned discretionary accruals is associated with the abnormal audit fee, i.e., the difference between actual audit fee and auditors' expectation on the normal level of fee. The results of various regressions reveal that the association between the two is insignificant for the full sample, significantly positive for the subsample of clients with positive abnormal fees, and insignificantly negative for the subsample of clients with negative abnormal fees. The above results suggest that auditors' incentives to compromise audit quality differ systematically depending on whether the clients pay more than or less than the normal level of audit fees, which in turn leads to the audit fee-audit quality association being conditioned on the sign of abnormal audit fees. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks. Relevant implications of our results to policy makers and academic researchers are discussed.
Author: Rani Hoitash Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
This paper extends prior research on audit risk adjustment by examining the association of audit pricing with problems in internal control over financial reporting, disclosed under Sections 404 and 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While studies of auditors' responses to internal control risk provide mixed evidence, it is important to re-examine this issue using data on specific client problems not available prior to SOX. As a baseline, we first establish a strong association of audit fees with internal control problems disclosed in the first year of implementation of Section 404, consistent with prior research (e.g., Raghunandan and Rama 2006). We then address two issues on which prior results are contradictory. In a broadly-based sample of accelerated filers, we find that audit pricing for companies with internal control problems varies by problem severity, when severity is measured either as material weaknesses vs. significant deficiencies, or by nature of the problem. Also, while audit fees increase during the 404 period, our tests show less relative risk adjustment under Section 404 than under Section 302 in the prior year. Further examining intertemporal effects, we find that companies disclosing internal control problems under Section 302 continue to pay higher fees the following year, even if no problems are disclosed under Section 404. Overall, our findings provide detailed insight into audit risk adjustment during the initial period of SOX implementation.
Author: Paul A. Griffin Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This paper offers new findings on the relation between auditor dismissals and resignations and audit fees. Unlike the prior research, which studies the fees of auditors after an auditor change, we focus on audit fees before an auditor change. Our evidence shows that incumbent auditors charge unusually higher fees at least one year prior to an auditor change event. The existence of unusual fee adjustments by incumbents may serve as a precursor of such events. In the case of dismissals, we reason that if clients perceive the presence of unusually higher audit fees as an indication that their costs are excessive, this should prompt a switch in auditors. We find evidence consistent with this view. For resignations, we interpret unusually higher incumbent fees not as a sign of client-perceived excess but as a signal by auditors that resignation companies reflect higher levels of audit risk or liability, which incumbents capture as additional fees. Eventually, however, the additional fees are insufficient, and the auditor resigns. While our results are based mostly on the audit fee disclosures after Sarbanes-Oxley, we control for and find similar results for periods not dominated by the legislation. Our results are similar for each of the Big 4 firms.
Author: Ariel J. Markelevich
Author: Ariel J. Markelevich
Author: 王旭升
Author: Stephen R. Moehrle
Author: Aloke Ghosh
Author: Patrick Krauss
Author: Jeffrey Coulton
Author: Jong-Hag Choi
Author: Rani Hoitash
Author: Paul A. Griffin
Author: Gary Previts