Corporate Governance, Fees for Non-Audit Services and Accrual Choices

We examine the relation between the relative amount of fees paid to auditors for non-audit services and the behavior of accrual measures. We extend prior research in two important directions. First, using a pooled sample of 2,295 firms for the fiscal year 2000, we find very little evidence of a relation between the provision of non-audit services and measure of accruals. However, there appears to be three distinct clusters of firms where only one cluster (consisting of only about 20 percent of the sample) exhibits a statistically positive association between non-audit fees and accrual behavior. Second, we examine the corporate governance characteristics of firms in the cluster with a positive association between non-audit fees and accrual behavior relative to the remaining firms. We find that this subset of firms have a smaller market capitalization, lower institutional holdings, higher insider holdings, smaller board of directors (and audit committee), and lower percentage of independent board (and audit committee) members. These results suggest that the provision of non-audit services is potentially problematic only for a small subset of firms that appear to be de facto controlled by management