경영자 스톡옵션 보상이 감사보수에 미치는 영향

This paper investigates the effect of executives’ stock option plans on audit fees. The major benefit of executives’ stock option plans is to achieve goal congruence between managers and stockholders. Executives are generally assumed to be risk-averse but shareholders are assumed to be risk neutral since stockholders can diversify their investment risk. Thus, management might make conservative decisions which might be not optimal in maximizing stockholders’ wealth. The executives’ stock option plan can encourage risk averse managements to make optimal decisions for stockholders through risk-sharing. The stock option plan has been widely used in practice since it was introduced in 1997 in Korea. Many prior papers empirically documented that the stock option plan increased firm value by encouraging managements to have more long-term perspectives and make more value-maximizing decisions. However, the executives’ stock option plan does not always lead to the positive effects. When managements are compensated with the stock option plan, managements might bear excessive risk or focus on short-term earnings to maximize their stock option-based compensation instead of maximizing stockholders’ wealth. It was argued in practice that managements manipulated earnings to increase their stock option-based profits in various accounting fraud cases such as Enron and Worldcom. * Associate Professor, College of Business Administration, Dongguk University-Seoul ** Professor, College of Business Administration, Dongguk University-Seoul *** Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate School of Dongguk University-Seoul Audit risk is a combination of inherent risk, control risk and detection risk. The executives’ stock option plans may affect the control risk. Managements are responsible for designing and implementing their entity’s internal control system to prevent or detecting material misstatements in financial statements. Even if the design of the internal control system is completely effective, its operating effectiveness depends on the competency and integrity of managements implementing it. That is, managements might override its internal control system to manage the entity’s reported earnings, leading to increase in control risk. The stock option plan might provide the opportunities for executives to manage the entity’s reported earnings. If external auditors recognize such managements’ opportunistic behaviors caused by the stock option-based compensation plan, they might demand higher audit fees for the firms having the executives’ sock option plan. Up to now, few empirical researches have addressed the impacts of the stock option plan on audit fees. This study tried to empirically answer the following two research questions; (1) Are audit fees higher for firms with the stock option plan than firms without it? (2) Are audit fees significantly related to the ratio of stock option compensation to management’s total compensation amount?To address two research questions, we collect non-financing firms data from Korean listed companies for the period 2000-2005. We use 231 firm-year sample data of firms with the executives’ stock option plan, matched with 231 firm-year control data of firms without it. Sample firms are matched with control firms, based on the year, industry, firm size and audit quality criteria. Our empirical result shows that Audit fees are significantly higher for firms with the stock option plan than firms without it. In addition, Our result strongly supports the second hypothesis that higher audit fees are associated with higher ratio of stock option compensation to management’s total compensation amount. These results might imply that the stock option plan provides opportunities for managers to inflate their reported earnings, leading to increase in audit risk. That is, it can be interpreted that since the stock option plan increases audit risk, external auditors demand higher audit fees to compensate for higher audit risk.