Big4 감사품질의 우수성은 모든 규모의 기업에 적용되는가?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In general, audit firm size has widely been used as a substitute measure for audit quality. A number of studies have been conducted to evaluate if such measure were appropriately reflected upon the true face of audit quality. According to precedent studies on audit quality of other countries, those scholars assert that highly reputable and large scale audit corporations like Big 4 provide their clients with a higher-quality audit than other smaller audit firms. Unlike those foreign countries, outstanding audit quality of Big 4 in Korea has not consistently been exhibited according to prior studies on the differences in audit quality with respect to the size of audit corporations. The aim of this study is to display that Big 4 audit firms do not provide corporations at all sizes with higher audit quality than other auditors. Instead, we will positively analyze how audit firm size with high audit quality changes directly proportional to the size of audited corporations. There have been many direct or indirect studies on the relationship between an auditor's reputation or size and the audit quality, but they have not yielded any satisfactory results. That is, most studies from other countries including the US have exhibited that audit quality of Big 4 was significantly higher than the others. Such differences in audit quality, however, have been not only inconsistent, but also negligible sometimes according to the domestic research. In most precedent studies on audit quality, researchers dichotomized audit corporations as Big 4 in cooperation with internationally reputable audit firms and non-Big 4, and conducted their analysis to prove their hypothesis that audit quality of large audit firms was consistently better than that of non-Big 4 regardless of the size of audited corporations. However, the above research method took the prior studies of other countries for granted without considering the reality of audit market in Korea. For this constraint in the research method, differences in audit quality among audit firms were not fairly determined. In Korea, the government has given various benefits to large audit firms by enacting laws and regulations to cultivate them. On the other hand, other audit firms without receiving such benefits have provided with their unique service, that’s not possessed by the large corporations, in specialized audit service market and satisfied the market demand for their pursuit of survival and development. In Korea, the size of audited corporations has been constrained by an auditor's size and structure. Various sizes of companies exist even among the listed corporations, the users of audit service. For instance, 46.78% of those companies have the total asset of less than 50 billion won. Thus, various audit organizations have provided their clients with their specialized service. Moreover, it is thought to be an extremely strong assumption to classify the audit corporations into Big 4 and non-Big 4 and assert that audit quality of the former was proven to be higher than that of the latter for corporations at all levels without considering such aforementioned heterogeneous audit service market. Therefore, this research is to find reasons why the audit quality of large audit firms in cooperation with internationally reputable audit corporations is not proven to be consistent. Moreover, we will attempt to figure out if audit quality is affected by the correlation between an audit firm as the auditor in the audit service market and an audited corporation as a user. Upon specifically categorizing the audit corporations into Big 4, Local Big, Local Small and audit team and dividing corporations into five categories based on their total asset, we examined if selective audit quality according to audit firm size changed depending on the size of an audited corporation. In other words, the aim of this paper is to positively analyze that audit firm size should change directly proportional to the size of an audi

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