감사품질에 대한 고객기업의 만족도와 감사보수의 관계

This study empirically examines the association between the degree of satisfaction on audit quality in view of the client firms and audit fees. While auditors directly review, examine and audit the client firms, the client firms provide auditors with related documents and audit evidences. In addition, client firms pay audit fees for the audit services provided by auditors. That is, both parties actively communicate with each other during the process of audit. Accordingly, the two parties are the most important principals for the audit tasks and it is also very important for client firms to be satisfied with the services from auditors and negotiate with auditors for audit fees based on the degree of satisfaction on audit quality. However, up to now, there have been almost no archival research on the audit quality in view of client firms, while there have been voluminous research on audit quality in view of the auditors. Considering audit fees are the price of audit services, research should consider both supply side and demand side of that service. Prior literature, however, has been focusing on the supply side characteristics such as audit hour, client size, audit risk, and auditor change. In this respect, this study has two contributions. First, we extend research area by focusing on demand side of audit service which is important but not actively investigated. Therefore, the findings in this study shows relatively new aspect to audit fee contract. Second, we further investigate which aspect of satisfaction on audit quality (external or internal) is more important for audit fee contract. If auditors provide high-quality audit services to client firms, the client firms would be more satisfied with those services compared to low-quality services and are expected to pay higher audit fees in return for the high-quality services. This study investigates the prediction using empirical data. The client firms' level of satisfaction on audit quality is measured by the survey data provided by Song's(2003). Song surveyed hundreds of companies and collected the answers on 42 questions on both the internal and external aspects of audit quality. A total of 123 firms' data are finally used in this research. In his paper, Song divided the degree of total satisfaction into two distinct components based on the client firms' point of view: internal versus external satisfaction. External satisfaction represents the audit quality perceived by client firms for the ability of auditors in providing outside parties such as investors with quality accounting information which is in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles. In contrast, internal satisfaction represents the audit quality perceived by client firms for the ability of auditors in providing professional service to client firms to meet the demand of the clients. The empirical results from median regression analysis reveal that the audit fees are positively related to the total level of satisfaction by client firms as we expected. We believe this finding is meaningful to auditors because these empirical evidences suggest a new approach for audit firms to make themselves more competitive. When we further divide the total level of satisfaction to internal versus external satisfaction, the results show that only the level of external satisfaction is significantly associated with audit fees. This result implies that the main role of auditor is to provide audit service related with client firms' external satisfaction. Therefore, internal satisfaction on audit service is not directly related to audit fee. If client firms want more specific services closely related with internal satisfaction, they will buy non-audit services. Although our findings provide regulators, academics, client firms, practitioners, and investors with valuable insights into the determinants of audit fees, this study has some caveats. First, our analyses heavily depend on survey data for the measurement of client satisfaction. In general, survey data are regarded as unreliable because they are exposed to responser's subjectiveness resulting in measurement error. Second, our findings are based on one year data and small sample. Because of that, our results should be interpreted with caution.