Understanding the potential effects of regulatory sanctions on audit firms for audit failure is of great interest to regulatory bodies and investors. Although audit-related disciplinary sanctions are relatively common, investigating the impact of regu...
Understanding the potential effects of regulatory sanctions on audit firms for audit failure is of great interest to regulatory bodies and investors. Although audit-related disciplinary sanctions are relatively common, investigating the impact of regulatory sanctions to the audit firm is challenging. On one hand, most sanctions are relatively minor, and therefore are unlikely to have a significant impact on the sanctioned audit firm. On the other hand, too severe sanctions make the continuation of the audit firm that receives the sanction impossible. In both cases, it is difficult to investigate the changes that the sanctioned audit firm introduces after the sanction. In this study, we exploit a rare case in which the sanction imposed was quite significant but the sanctioned accounting firm still survived after the sanction to examine the effect of the sanction on the audit firm. Specifically, this study investigates the relationship between the sanction imposed by the Financial Supervisory Service to “A accounting firm” and its audit quality, audit hours, audit f ees, and market share before and a fter the s anction. A accounting firm was disallowed from accepting any new audit clients for the next 12 months in 2017 due to an alleged audit failure. However, A accounting firm was able to keep global affiliation with a Big4 international audit firm and continued to operate after making several changes to improve its audit quality.
The results using a difference-in-differences method are as follows. First, the audit quality of A accounting firm, which is proxied by discretionary accruals, performance matched discretionary accruals, accounting conservatism, and small profit reporting, was not significantly different from that of other Big4 accounting firms during the pre-sanction period, but improved in the post-sanction period. The fact that t here i s no s ignificant d ifference in a udit q uality o f A accounting f irm compared with other accounting firms in the period before the sanction suggests that the audit failure that caused the sanction probably was not from the accounting firm-wide problem. While there was no difference in audit quality between A accounting firm and other Big4 firms, audit fees and audit hours of A accounting firm during the pre-sanction period are relatively lower than those of other accounting firms. After the sanction, audit fees and audit hours of A accounting firm increased significantly. The changes in audit quality, audit fees, and audit hours before and after the sanction are greater than the changes occurred during the same period in other auditors. However, despite the improvement in audit quality of A accounting firm, A accounting firm lost its market share after the sanction. The results are generally similar in the analysis using a sample that uses only Big4 auditors. When A accounting firm is individually compared with each of the three other Big 4 audit firms, the findings are also generally similar. Lastly, the results using a propensity score matching sample are similar.
Overall, this study provides evidence that regulatory sanctions have a significant impact on audit quality. Our findings provide important insights for regulators and policy making bodies.