审计师任期、事务所任期与审计质量

Audit Partner Tenure,Audit Firm Tenure and Audit Quality

利用审计师对财务危机的公司是否出具持续经营的查核意见,以及企业的异常营运资本,作为研究衡量审计质量良莠的代理变量,分析了中国审计师任期与会计师事务所任期对审计质量的影响。如果以查核意见作为被解释变量,没有发现审计师任期或事务所任期与审计质量有关联性的证据。然而,一旦以异常营运资本作为分析对象时,则发现较长的审计师任期有助于提高审计质量的证据。此外,当企业有增加盈余的动机时,还发现会计师事务所内的审计师之间有审计经验传承的效果。进一步的分析则显示,前述的发现主要来自于非四大会计师事务所。换言之,审计师任期的经验效果对于非四大会计师事务所更为重要。

Effects of the audit tenure on the audit quality in China were studied by investigating the effect of audit-firm and audit-partner tenure on two proxies of audit quality： （1） auditor＇s propen sity to issue a going-concern audit opinion for distressed companies, and （2） the direction and amount of abnormal working capital accruals. For the former as the proxy variable, there is no linear relation between the tenure and audit quality. However, when we turn to use the latter as the proxy variable, we find that longer tenure helps to produce higher audit quality. Moreover, we find evidence that there exists knowledge spillover effect within audit firms when the clients have incentive to increase their earnings. A further analysis shows that the main previous finding on abnormal accruals is attributable to the non-Big 4 auditors, which implies that the positive effect of auditor tenure＇s knowl- edge and expertise is more important for non-big 4 auditors.