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

本研究使用一种基于文本分析的新方法来检验拥有相同审计师的公司的管理报告是否比拥有不同审计师的公司拥有更相似的管理报告。对于审计师在财务报告过程中作为经济代理人的作用，文本上的相似之处应该引起很大的关注：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。这种介入将导致审计师的自我检查，这从根本上质疑他们的客观性和独立性，并与国际审计准则(ISA)的道德要求形成鲜明对比。在德国，大多数私营(和公共)公司都被要求准备管理报告，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营和公共公司的经审计的管理报告的独特数据集。我们设置的另一个特点是审计师在审计意见上签名。这使我们能够识别单个审计师，而不是像美国当前法规下那样只识别审计公司。使用真实的个人审计师姓名的详细数据，我们还可以分离出审计师S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。我们的结果可能会引起审计界的兴趣，因为我们的发现可能预示着潜在的审计师独立性问题。此外，我们的发现说明了审计在两个特定背景下的作用，在这两个特定背景下，由于数据限制，先前的研究很少：对私营公司的审计和对质量管理报告的审计。我们阐明了审计在这两种情况下的潜在后果。

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.