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Are auditors involved in preparing the financial reports of the firms they audit?

审计师是否参与准备其审计的公司的财务报告？

基本信息

批准号：
395387084
负责人：
Professor Dr. Martin Nienhaus
金额：
--
依托单位：
Lehrstuhl für Financial Accounting
依托单位国家：
德国
项目类别：
Research Grants
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
德国
起止时间：
2017-12-31 至 2019-12-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/395387084?language=en
关键词：
auditors involved preparing financial reports

项目摘要

This study uses a novel approach based on textual analysis to test whether firms with the same auditor have textually more similar management reports than firms with a different auditor. The presence of textual similarities should be a large concern about the role of the auditor as an economic agent in the financial reporting process: If auditors are involved in preparing financial reports, this may severely impair the value of audits. Such involvement would lead to self-inspection by the auditors, which fundamentally questions their objectivity and independence, and stands in stark contrast to the ethical requirements of the International Standards on Auditing (ISA).For our analysis, we exploit a unique institutional setting. In Germany, most private (and public) firms are mandated to prepare management reports, which are also subject to a mandatory audit. Unlike private firms in the US, private firms in Germany must also make their financial statements and management reports publicly available. Hence, we have access to a unique dataset of audited management reports from private and public firms. Another feature of our setting is that auditors sign the audit opinion with their names. This allows us to identify individual auditors and not just audit firms, as under the current regulations in the US. Using the detailed data of actual individual auditors´ names, we can also isolate whether the auditor´s influence originates at the individual, office, or firm level. We also conduct personal in-depth interviews with auditors to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms of auditor-driven textual similarity.Our results may be of interest to the auditing profession because our findings could signal potential auditor independence issues. Moreover, our findings speak to the role of auditing in two specific contexts in which prior research is scant because of data limitations: the auditing of private firms and the auditing of qualitative management reports. We shed light on the potential consequences of audits in these two contexts.

本研究采用一种基于文本分析的新方法来检验具有相同审计师的公司是否比具有不同审计师的公司有更多的文本相似的管理报告。文本相似性的存在应该是审计师作为财务报告过程中的经济代理人的作用的一个大问题：如果审计师参与编制财务报告，这可能会严重损害审计的价值。这种参与将导致审计师的自我检查，从根本上质疑其客观性和独立性，并与国际审计准则（ISA）的道德要求形成鲜明对比。为了我们的分析，我们利用了一个独特的机构环境。在德国，大多数私营（和公共）公司都被要求编写管理报告，这些报告也必须接受强制性审计。与美国的私营企业不同，德国的私营企业还必须公开其财务报表和管理报告。因此，我们可以访问来自私人和公共公司的审计管理报告的独特数据集。我们设置的另一个特点是，审计员在审计意见书上签上自己的名字。这使我们能够识别个别审计师，而不仅仅是审计公司，因为根据美国现行法规。使用实际个人审计师姓名的详细数据，我们还可以区分出审计师的影响力是来自个人、办公室还是公司层面。我们还对审计师进行了个人深入访谈，以更深入地了解审计师驱动的文本相似性的潜在机制。我们的研究结果可能会引起审计行业的兴趣，因为我们的研究结果可能预示着潜在的审计师独立性问题。此外，我们的研究结果在两个特定的背景下，在先前的研究是缺乏的，因为数据的限制：审计的私人公司和审计的定性管理报告的审计审计的作用。我们揭示了在这两种情况下审计的潜在后果。