감사품질과 이익투명성

초록

Recently, the interest in increasing accounting transparency has been actively discussed. Unified definition in accounting transparency has not yet been reached. According to the previous studies, accounting transparency is closely related to reliability of financial information. Accordingly, we expect the reliability of financial information increases accounting transparency. Audit quality is the quality of the audit work and is generally defined as the joint probability of expertise and independence of the auditor. Here, an auditor"s expertise refers to the probability of finding distortions or errors contained in the financial statement and independence refers to the probability of reporting any discovered distortion or errors. In other words, a high audit quality means that expertise and independence results in an improved reliability of accounting information. Therefore, the higher the audit quality, the higher the accounting transparency. One of the most useful information for investment decision making and performance evaluation is accounting earnings. Also auditors tend to focus on the reliability of accounting earnings to maintain reputation because most of plaintiffs complain about accounting earnings when they enter lawsuits against auditors. As a result, the higher audit quality of the auditor will have a positive impact on the transparency of the earnings. In this context, this study analyzed whether earnings transparency is affected by the audit quality. Specifically, this study examined the impact of audit quality on earnings transparency by using size of auditors and auditor industry specialization as the proxies for audit quality and by measuring earnings transparency based on prior studies of Cheng and Subramanyam(2008) and Barth et al.(2013). The result was a significantly positive relationship between the audit quality and the earnings transparency. This result means that the higher the audit quality, the higher the earnings transparency. This study could provide an additional perspective on audit quality as the study analyzed the influence of audit quality on earnings transparency. The results of this study could also give implication about audit quality and the auditor appointment system improvement for the purpose of establishing earnings transparency to information user, client firms and supervisory institutions.

키워드