Quality of Financial Statements and Tenure of Statement-Related Personnel

This study investigates the association between quality of financial statements and tenure of statement-related personnel. First, we examined whether there is still a significant association between financial statement quality and the tenure of audit partners who are responsible for the quality assurance of financial statements after the implementation of mandatory audit partner rotation. We addressed this issue by using a sample of Taiwan Residents companies, with which no significant association between audit partner tenure and the magnitude of discretionary accruals （DA）, a common proxy for financial statement quality, was found. Second, we investigated whether an association exists between the financial statement quality and the tenure of management who is responsible for the preparation of financial statements. We also addressed this issue by using Taiwan Residents data and found a significant association between management tenure （MT） and the magnitude of DA. Our findings provide evidence that audit partner tenure would neither improve nor deteriorate the quality assurance of a financial statement, when there is a mandatory audit partner rotation after a fixed period of time. Whereas how MT affects financial statement quality after the enactment of the mandatory audit partner rotation is dependent on the management position. Increasing tenure of chief executive officer （CEO） and chief financial officer （CFO） will enhance and hinder financial statement quality respectively. In the end, we found a significant interaction of tenure between auditor and CFO. This result implies that the downward bias of CFO on the financial statement preparation can be mitigated by auditors with increasing tenure.

Audit Partner Rotation, Audit Quality, and Dynamic Industry Structure

Previous research on the relationship between audit partner tenure and audit quality assumed that auditors conducted auditing works in a stable external environment where the corporate and management behavior was highly predictable. This study uses the joint tenure between audit partners and management to explain audit quality, because corporate directors would consider an appropriate adjustment in the management to deal with a dramatic change in the external environment. First, we examined whether there is a significant association between audit partner tenure and audit quality after the implementation of mandatory audit partner rotation by using the auditor tenure only. We addressed this issue by using a sample of Taiwan Residents companies and found no significant association between audit partner tenure and the magnitude of discretionary accruals （DA）, a common proxy for audit quality. Second, we tested the relationship between audit partner tenure and audit quality under the consideration of industry structure stability. The result exhibits a negative relation between audit partner tenure and audit quality under the control of industry structural stability which is measured by a proxy variable, the joint tenure between audit partner and management. Third, we investigated whether the association does exist between joint tenure of auditors and management and audit quality. We also addressed this issue by using Taiwan Residents data and found a significant association between the joint tenure of auditor and management and the magnitude of DA. Our findings provide evidence that the use of a mandatory rotation rule is an ineffective way to improve audit quality.