감사인 지정제도가 신규상장기업의 이익조정에 미치는 영향

최성호(제1저자) ( Sung-ho Choi ),김인숙(교신저자) ( In-sook Kim ),최관(공동저자) ( Kwan Choi ) 한국회계학회 2015 회계학연구 Vol.40 No.6

감사인 지정제도는 투자자를 보호하기 위해 공정한 감사가 필요하다고 인정되는 기업에 대해서 독립적인 외부감사가 이루어지도록 감사인을 지정하는 제도이다. 특히 신규상장기업에 대해서는 기존투자자와 신규투자자간의 정보비대칭이 크기 때문에 신규투자자를 보호하기 위하여 2006년부터 상장 전 감사인을 지정하고 있다. 만약 규제기관의 도입 취지대로 감사인 지정제도가 순기능을 한다면 감사인 자유수임제가 시행되던 기간에 비해 감사인 지정제도가 시행되던 기간에 감사인이 더욱 엄격한 감사를 수행할 것이다. 하지만 감사인 지정제도를 시행하여 감사품질이 향상되는 긍정적 효과에 비해 감사의 효율성이 하락하여 감사품질이 낮아지는 부정적 효과가 더 크다면 감사인 지정제 기간에 상장한 기업이 자유수임제 기간보다 감사품질이 더 낮을 것이다. 본 연구는 감사품질을 선행연구와 같이 이익조정으로 측정하고, 감사인 지정제도가 신규상장기업의 상장 전 이익조정에 미치는 영향을 검증하였다. 또한 감사인 지정기간이 끝나고 자유수임으로 전환되는 첫해에 지정감사인을 감사인으로 계속 선임하는 기업과 감사인을 새로 교체하는 기업의 상장 전 보고이익을 비교하였다. 본 논문은 코스닥시장에 2001년부터 2010년까지 신규상장한 기업 중에서 표본선정기준을 만족한 452개 기업을 최종 분석대상으로 하였다. 분석결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 감사인 자유수임제를 시행하던 기간에 비해 감사인 지정제도를 시행하는 기간에 신규상장기업의 상장 전 이익조정이 유의하게 증가하였다. 이는 규제기관이 감사인 지정제도를 통하여 신규상장기업의 회계정보에 대한 신뢰성과 투명성을 확보하고자 한 본래 취지와는 다른 결과이다. 둘째, 지정기간이 끝난 후인 상장후 첫 회계기간에 기존 지정감사인을 감사인으로 계속 선임하는지의 여부에 따라 상장 전 이익조정에 유의한 차이가 있는지를 분석한 결과, 지정감사인을 계속 선임한 기업이 감사인을 교체한 기업에 비해 상장 전 이익을 더 상향조정하였다. 이는 지정감사인이 상장 후 자유수임에 따른 감사계약을 고려하여 엄격한 감사를 실시하지 않고 있다는 것을 의미하므로, 지정감사인이 사회적으로 요구하는 수준의 외부감사를 수행하지 못하고 있다는 실증적인 증거이다. 셋째, 표본기업의 표본선택편의를 줄이기 위해 propensity score matching 방법을 적용하여 가설을 검증한 결과, 회귀분석 결과와 질적으로 차이가 나타나지 않았다. The objective of auditor designation regulation is to improveaccounting transparency and reliability through enhancement of auditor independence. The regulation assigns statutory auditors to the selected firms that are highly likely to adopt discretionary accounting methods. IPO firms are not familiar to investors in capital market and have high information asymmetry between existing and new investors. Financial Supervisory Service(FSS) designates auditors to IPO firms one year before IPO to improve auditors`` independence and protect new investors. If the regulation is put in force as effectively as FSS intended, the assigned firms will be audited more strictly after the regulation is enacted. However, if the regulation is not effective because of its inefficiency, audit quality will deteriorate after enforcement. This paper also compares the earnings management during the designation period, one year before IPO, for the firm which employs the designated auditor as an ongoing auditor after the designation period with the earnings management for the firm which changes its auditor into other auditor. If the designated auditor wants to be employed again in the same firm after his(her) designation period, he(she) may tolerate the accounting discretion of the firm and lacks independence. For that reason, the supervisory agency amends the regulation in December 2014. It prohibits the designated auditor to be a continuous auditor in the same firm after IPO. The result of this paper can foretell te effectiveness of the amendment. This paper investigates the effect of the auditor designation regulation on audit quality of IPO firms. Audit quality is measured by discretionary accruals that are often used as proxy of earnings management. We also investigate and compare discretionary accruals one year before IPO for the firms that employ the designated auditors again as their auditors after IPO with those that change the assigned auditors. If the assigned auditors want to be ongoing auditors after IPO, there may be conflicts in ethics, as they may not do their audit work strictly and may allow discretionary accounting. This paper selects 452 IPO firms in KOSDAQ market as sample firms during the period of 2001-2010. The results of the paper are following. First, IPO firms show higher earnings management after the regulation than before. The results are not consistent with the intent of FSS that wants to improve accounting quality through the enforcement of the regulation. Second, firms which employ the assigned auditors as their auditors again after IPO show higher earnings management than the firms that change their auditors. This means the assigned auditors have not done audit work strictly but may allow accounting discretion because they want to be employed as auditors continuously after IPO. Third, propensity score matching method is used additionally in sampling process to mitigate the limitation of self selection bias in the analysis. This paper provides a few robustness tests. First, discretionary accruals of one year before of IPO are compared depending on the type of auditors to be employed one year after IPO. The type of auditors are, designated auditor, previous auditor before the auditor designation, and other auditor. No significant differences in earnings management are found between the previous auditor and other auditor who are employed after IPO. Second, we examine whether audit tenure affects the earnings management. The IPO firm can employ the designated auditor up to three years before IPO if the firm delays IPO process. We find no significant effect of audit tenure on the audit quality

이익공시의 적시성과 주가붕괴위험

강나라(제1저자) ( Na Ra Kang ),최권일(교신저자) ( Kwon Il Choi ),최관(공동저자) ( Kwan Choi ) 한국회계학회 2015 회계학연구 Vol.40 No.6

본 연구는 이익공시의 적시성에 따라 주가붕괴위험이 어떻게 다른가를 살펴보았다. 주가붕괴란 단기간 내에 극단적인 음(-)의 수익률이 발생하는 현상으로, 선행연구에서는 누적된 나쁜 뉴스(bad news)가 일시에 전달되는 것을 원인으로 지목해 왔다. 적시성과주가붕괴위험은 밀접한 관련이 있을 수 있다. 왜냐하면 나쁜 뉴스를 보류하려는 경영자의의도가 적시성에 영향을 주기 때문이다. 본 연구는 이익공시의 적시성을 이익보고시차(reporting delay)와 이익보고간격(reportinginterval)으로 구분하여 적시성과 주가붕괴위험과의 관련성을 살펴보았다. 두 가지 측정방법 모두 적시성의 수준이 높을수록 주가붕괴위험이 낮은 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과는 나쁜 뉴스의 전달을 보류하려는 경영자의 의도가 이익공시의 적시성에 반영됨을 의미한다. 추가분석으로 기업의 투명성과 관련된 적시성을 통제한 후 적시성 수준의 변화분과 주가붕괴위험과의 관련성을 살펴보았다. 왜냐하면 기업정보의 투명성의 수준에 따라 적시성 수준은 상당한 예측가능성을 가짐으로, 투명성과 관련된 적시성 수준을 통제한 후에도 주가붕괴위험과 관련성이 있는가를 살펴보기 위해서다. 추가분석결과, 투명성 수준을 통제한 후에도 적시성 수준이 높을수록 주가붕괴위험이 낮은 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구는 경영자의 의도가 적시성에 영향을 줌으로 적시성과 주가붕괴위험이 밀접한 관련성을 갖는다는 점을 밝혔다. 더 나아가 이익의 중요한 질적 속성 중의 하나인 적시성에 대한 이해를 넓혔다. 본 연구의 결과는 공시정책 담당자뿐만 아니라 투자자들에게도 시사하는 바가 클 것으로 기대된다. This study examines the association between timeliness of earnings announcement and stock price crash risk. Stock price crash risk is defined as the probability that the extreme negative return occurs in the short term period(DeFond et al. 2015). Prior researches report that stock price crash is more likely to happen when the accumulated bad news are released to investors at once(Jin and Myers 2006, Hutton et al. 2009, Francis et al. 2011, Kim and Zhang 2015). Also, opacity is one of the factors that cause stock price crash since firms with low transparency are more likely to cumulate bad news(Hutton et al. 2009). If the timeliness of earnings announcement is affected by both managers`` intention which is not to delivered bad news in a timely manner and firm-specific transparency level, then it should be associated with stock price crash risk. In this study, we proxy for crash risk with two measures: (i) the indicator variable that equals to one if a firm experiences one or more firm-specific weekly returns falling 3.2 or more standard deviations below the mean firm-specific weekly return for fiscal year and (ii) the negative skewness of firm-specific weekly returns. Earnings timeliness is influenced by manager``s intention to withhold bad news(Givoly and Palmon 1982, Patell and Wolfson 1982). Also, the timeliness of a firm``s earnings announcement is one of the factors to determine the firm-level transparency(Bushman et al. 2004). Therefore, we can expect that the timeliness of earnings announcement and stock price crash risk are closely related to each other. Generally, an improvement in reporting timeliness which include both reporting delay and reporting interval generates the positive value of financial reporting and provides more useful information. In our study, the reporting delay is measured by the period from the end of the fiscal year to earnings announcement day, and the reporting interval is measured by the frequency of voluntary earnings announcement following Feltham(1968). Total sample consists of 4,266 firm-year observations that are traded over Korea Exchange for the period 2004~2013 but the year of financial crisis period is excluded. Empirical evidences of our study show that the reporting delay and stock price crash risk have a significant and positive association. We also find that changes in reporting delay are significant and positively associated with stock price crash risk in all models after controlling for transparency that is related with timeliness using the last year``s reporting delay. We find that the frequency of voluntary earnings announcement is significantly and negatively associated with stock price crash risk. We take an additional analyses to examine the relation between frequency of voluntary earnings announcement and crash risk after controlling for firm-specific transparency levels that is related with frequency of voluntary earnings announcement. Additional tests yield that changes in voluntary earnings announcement are significantly and negatively associated with stock price crash risk after controlling for firm-specific transparency levels using last year`` reporting frequency. We could interpret this result as the voluntary reporting frequency reflects the manager``s intention to withhold bad news. This study contributes to the literatures as the below; First, this study explores the relation between timeliness of earnings announcement and stock price crash risk. Though timeliness is one of the important earning qualitative characteristics, up to the present, there is little empirical evidence to examine this relation. Generally, the prior literatures which explore stock price crash risk investigate the relation between earnings quality, such as conservatism and discretionary accruals, and stock price crash risk(Kim and Zhang 2015, Hutton et al. 2009). In contrast, this study explores the association between timeliness and stock price crash, it widens the understanding of the relationship between the stock price crash and the earning qualitative characteristics. Second, this study proves the positive relation between timeliness of earnings announcement and stock price crash risk which is caused by accumulation of bad news. We expect that the results of this study contribute to not only the persons in charge of disclosure but also investors.