감사의견의 보수화에 대한 실증적 연구

In this study we examine that auditors became more conservative in their audit opinion decision since the year 2002 in order to avoid government regulation and legal litigation on their profession. Motivation for this study comes from the need to assess the effect of the changed auditing environment on audit opinion decisions after the crisis of foreign exchange reserve. We examine the prior audit opinions issued for 53 security market listed firms that entered into legal reconstruction procedure during the years 1999 through 2009. Our research hypothesis is that audit opinion stated by external auditor would be more conservative in the period after the year 2002. It results in a higher likelihood that legal reconstruction firms would have received a prior going-concern modified audit opinion. Our empirical results are as follows. First, the proportion of prior going-concern modified audit opinion to clean opinion in the post January 2002 is significantly higher than that in the earlier period. Second, in the logit regression analysis the time variable is significantly positive. This result indicates that auditors were more likely to issue prior going-concern modified audit opinion after the year 2002. Our empirical evidence in this study suggests that auditor behavior related to going-concern reporting changed after the year 2002 to avoid legal and administrative regulation strengthened by unfaithful auditing.