After a long period of universal mandatory audit, the UK reduced the regulatory burden of private firms by introducing size-based audit exemption in 1994; the size thresholds have subsequently been progressively increased. Both accounting bodies and credit-rating agencies (CRAs) have expressed...

We investigate the relation between perceived competition and voluntary disclosure in the absence of capital market incentives by examining private UK companies, which have the option to withhold sales and costs of sales information from their publicly-filed accounts. We survey managers about...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>We explore the market response to announcements of first-time going-concern (GC) audit opinions and, for a subset of these cases, their subsequent withdrawal, from 1993 to 2005. We find that the market fully responds to GC withdrawal announcements but underreacts to the GC announcements...

With the European Commission making global leadership claims in the field of audit regulation, the content of its 2010 Green Paper on ‘Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis’ warrants careful scrutiny. Important issues raised in the Green Paper include regulatory oversight, competition in the...