2000년대의 감사환경 변화와 감사인 보수주의: 내부회계관리제도와 증권관련집단소송법을 중심으로 = The Effect of Audit Environment Changes in the 2000s on Auditor`s Conservatism: Focused on the Internal Control over Financial Reporting and the Securities-Related Class Action Act

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Well-known companies such as Enron, WoldCom, Tyco, Qwest, Global Crossing were exposed to accounting frauds after 2000 in US and there was increasingly growing concern about financial reporting reliability. To address this concern, Congress and Securities and Exchange Commission( SEC) enacted Sarbanes-Oxley Act( SOX). At the similar time, some accounting frauds of Korean companies such as SK Global, Daewoo and so on also happened and provoked the need of tightening up the monitoring system for accounting practices. According to the need, some new accounting reform acts such as Internal Control over Financial Reporting, Securities-Related Class Action Act and the like were brought about. Internal Control over Financial Reporting intended to make a strong internal control system in the company and had been enforced since 2005. Securities-Related Class Action Act intended to relieve investment loss related to security trades of investors and had been wholly enforced since 2007. Changes in the auditor``s environment could affect the efficiency of internal control system or litigation risk for auditor, and then auditor could change his reporting strategies for clients in response to these changes. Francis and Krishnan(1999) defined auditor reporting conservatism as lowering their threshold for issuing modified audit reports, an action that will increase modified reports and, therefore, lessen the likelihood of failing to issue a modified report when appropriate. It can be expected that introduction of internal control system in firms makes the reliability of financial reporting increase and could therefore decreases the control risk in financial statement audit. If the auditor relaxes his conservatism excessively and bears high audit risk over the acceptable level considerably, he could be exposed to lawsuits and reputation loss. On the other hand, if the auditor tightens his conservatism excessively and accepts low audit risk blow the acceptable level considerably, he might face the risk of losing clients because of strict audit. Therefore, the auditor needs to make an audit plan to maintain the acceptable level of audit risk. If the internal control over financial reporting improves the reliability of financial reporting of clients, control risk( CR) of auditor could decrease, and then auditor can achieve the acceptable level of audit risk, even if he sets less conservative audit strategy. In other words, when the auditor wants to maintain the acceptable level of audit risk, he can accept more detection risk( DR) through decrease of control risk( CR) after introduction of the internal control over financial reporting, Therefore the auditor could relax his conservatism after introduction of the internal control over financial reporting in 2005. On the other hand, the Securities-Related Class Action Act is likely to increase litigation risk of the auditor. Well-intentioned investors who are suffered great losses from trading securities could file a lawsuit against auditor on the ground of poor audit, and then the auditor might be exposed to litigation risk and reputation loss. If the auditor loses a lawsuit, he should bear an enormous compensation for a damage of investors because other investors who didn``t take a part in the legal action can also recover their damages. Therefore, the auditor needs to set an audit strategy more conservatively to deal with high litigation risk after the Securities-Related Class Action Act takes effect. The auditor could tighten his conservatism in correspondence with high litigation risk after the Securities-Related Class Action Act becomes effective totally in 2007. We investigate changes of the auditor conservatism respectively after the Internal Control over Financial Reporting and Securities-Related Class Action Act take effect. We divide total sample period into 3 subsample periods and investigate changes of auditor conservatism after enforcement of the two accounting reform systems. The first subsample period is one before the Internal Control over Financial Reporting became effective(2002-2004). The second subsample period is one from the internal control over financial reporting through the Securities-Related Class Action Act(2005-2006). The third subperiod is one after Securities-Related Class Action Act became effective(2007-2010). We use the going-concern modifications to investigate auditor conservatism, because the auditor conservatism could affect reporting the going-concern modifications. We estimate the average probability of issuing the going-concern modifications in each subperiod and calculate the difference of it between before and after the accounting reform system was enforced. And then we decompose the difference of the average probability of issuing the going-concern modifications into a component due to changes in auditor conservatism and a component due to changes in client risk characteristics. We can investigate the change of auditor conservatism directly by using the method of decomposition. This study contributes two points. First, we directly investigate effects of two accounting reform systems in 2000s to the auditor conservatism. We think Internal Control over Financial Reporting and Securities-Related Class Action Act are most important systems of accounting reform systems in 2000s. Some prior studies investigate effects of these systems, but there are nothing to observe the effect to the auditor conservatism. This study investigates the effect of Internal Control over Financial Reporting to the auditor conservatism for the first time and the effect of Securities-Related Class Action Act the auditor conservatism directly. Second, We improve the method of study to investigate the effect of system change to the auditor conservatism. Francis and Krishnan(2002) investigate the effect of system change by using the difference of probability of issuing the going-concern modifications between years before and after system takes effect. Their method of study could distort because unusual years could be inserted in sample years and auditor tenure could affect the auditor conservatism. We improve their method of study to solve limits and use an improved method to investigate change of auditor conservatism. Futhermore, we could have results by using more appropriate model to estimate the probability of issuing the going-concern modifications that can include auditor``s expected loss.

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