Auditors fulfill a crucial societal role by increasing the credibility of financial reports, which requires that appropriate audit quality be provided and auditors are factually independent and perceived as such. So far, regulators and researchers have focused on a few measures for improving...

Regulators increasingly express concerns over auditor-provided tax services (APTS) because those services could impair auditor independence. To date, research on the impact of APTS on auditor independence has yielded mixed results, potentially due to endogeneity issues, providing no clear...

Purpose: Litigation against auditors has augmented as the number of corporate failures increased over the past decades. A failure to exercise professional scepticism has been cited as one of the main contributing factors to audit failure. This research establishes a link between professional...

Open Innovation (OI) models have been studied in many fields. However, the challenges and opportunities of a possible OI paradigm application in external auditing have been under-researched. Recent corporate scandals are currently triggering changes and improvements in the regulatory framework...

To understand the disruption and implications of distributed ledger technologies for financial reporting and auditing, we analyze firm misreporting, auditor monitoring and competition, and regulatory policy in a unified model. A federated blockchain for financial reporting and auditing can...

We analyze whether and how mandatory audit partner rotation affects the audit adjustments for the rotated partner’s remaining clients. We argue mandatory audit partner rotation can affect audit production of remaining clients through two channels. First, it can cause audit partners to acquire...

One of the critical responsibilities of the auditor is to form an independent view of the company’s financial performance in the auditor’s statement. In Malaysia, the issue of auditor independence has recently become prominent due to the 1MDB scandal. Hence, this study focuses on determining...

We examine whether the naming of partners provides a benefit to the public in the context of allowing researchers to empirically collect evidence on the economic importance of non-audit services (NAS) at the partner level. We provide evidence showing that auditor independence is impaired when...

The auditor may provide numerous services to their clients covering audit and non-audit services (NAS). These services have been considered as a combination of services offering varying results for client firms. The mixed results reported by past studies in measuring the relation between NAS and...

This study investigated the effect of auditor's independence on the financial reporting quality of Parastatals in Lagos State, Nigeria. A survey was conducted to gather data on auditor's independence and a content analysis procedure was adopted to extract secondary data from the audited...

Multinational corporations (MNCs) hire auditors to assess business partners’ compliance with quality, working conditions, and environmental standards. Independent third-party auditors are widely assumed to outperform second-party auditors employed and thus controlled by MNCs. However,...

I examine the effects of occupational licensing on the quality of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). I exploit the staggered adoption of the 150-hour rule, which increases the educational requirements for a CPA license. The analysis shows that the rule decreases the number of entrants into the...

On 15 December 2015, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) passed Rule 3211, requiring audit firms registered with PCAOB in the U.S. to disclose the audit engagement partner’s name in the Form AP, effective 31 January 2017. The regulation aims to improve the transparency and...

We study regulation of the auditing profession in a model where audit quality is unobservable and enforcing regulation is costly. The optimal audit standard falls short of the first-best audit quality, and is increasing in the riskiness of firms and in the amount of funding they seek. The model...