In India, the government introduced mandatory audit firm rotation following calls to improve audit quality and auditor independence in the wake of the Satyam accounting scandal. The absence of strong institutional mechanisms to prevent and detect audit failure in a timely manner has led the...

We find that the audit report lag is significantly higher for former Andersen clients (that did not follow their Andersen partner to the new audit firm) than for clients voluntarily changing auditors from another Big 5 predecessor for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2002 (the first year with...