审计委员会性别特征、风险提示信息与审计意见

Audit Committee’s Gender Feature,Risk Warning Information and Audit Opinion

已有研究表明,年报风险提示信息会增加审计师出具非标准意见的概率。但是作为公司治理重要形式的审计委员会究竟在其中起到何种作用?不同的风险归因和风险类型对非标准意见的影响是否存在差异?目前尚缺少有力的证据。本文采用文本挖掘技术,选取审计委员会女性构成这个公司治理变量,分析考察其如何调节年报风险信息对审计意见的影响,在此基础上,进一步检验了风险归因与风险类型对不同审计意见出具的影响。研究发现:当审计委员会中女性成员较多或由女性担任主任委员时,年报风险提示信息的增加强化了上市公司获得非标准意见的可能性。进一步追踪风险归因发现,风险提示信息会通过其与固有风险之间形成的重大不一致性发挥出增量信息价值。同时,按照风险提示信息类型研究发现,不同类型的风险信息与非标审计意见的影响程度各异,显示出风险提示信息对审计师的行为具有不同的信息含量。研究结果表明:年报风险提示等非结构化信息对审计意见决策具有重要价值,体现了风险提示对审计师行为具有明显的"信息锚定效应",从而为会计信息尤其是风险信息披露准则的完善和审计质量的保证提供了一定的实证证据。

Research shows that risk warning information in annual reports would lead to the increase of non-standard audit opinion.However,there is little strong evidence to explain the role of audit committee which is an important part in corporate governance.Neither is there enough work to investigate the difference of the influence on non-standard audit opinion led by various risk attribution and risk types.By applying text mining technology,this paper takes female proportion as a parameter of corporate governance to examine its adjustment on the influence of risk information on audit opinion.Furthermore,this paper tests the influence of risk attribution and risk type on audit opinion.Results show that with more female members or a chairwoman in an audit committee,the increase of risk warning information will reinforce the probability of listed company’s obtaining non-standard audit opinion.Further investigation of risk attribution displays that risk warning information reflects incremental information value via major inconsistency between itself and inherent risk.Research of types of risk warning information reveals that different types of risk information and non-standard audit opinion vary in their influence,manifesting diversified quantity of risk warning information for auditors.The findings indicate that unstructured information,such as risk warning information,is significant in audit opinion decision-making,exhibiting an obvious information anchoring effect on auditors from risk warning.It provides empirical evidence for improving information disclosure principle of accounting information,especially risk information,and for safeguarding auditing quality.