감사인의 품질관리제도 영향 요소와 감사품질의 관련성: 금감원 품질관리감리 대상, 외국 회계감독기구 등록 여부 및 조직운영방식 유형을 중심으로

Upon enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley Acts in 2002, U. S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board(PCAOB) was established and began its investigations on the public accounting firms to evaluate their audit quality control system. Also, accounting firms, including foreign firms, auditing public companies listed in the U. S. stock exchanges are required to register with the Authority. In Korea, the Financial Supervisory Service(FSS), the Korean regulatory authority, implemented its quality control review program on Korean accounting firms auditing public companies listed in the Korean stock exchanges in 2007. Before then, such quality control reviews on the Korean accounting firms had been performed only by Korean Institute of Certified Public Accountants(KICPA). Also, FSS is presently preparing for a registration rules for auditors of Korean public companies. Similarly, EU and Japan regulatory authorities have changed their regulatory systems including registration requirements for the third country accounting firms auditing public companies listed in their national stock exchanges, and the relevant regulations also include the authorities’ quality control review program on the registered accounting firms located in the third countries. Many Korean auditors have registered with those foreign regulatory authorities to comply with these requirements. These global changes are based on the assumptions that auditor registration and regulatory authority’s investigation on the quality controls of the (registered) auditors would eventually improve audit quality. In addition, Carcello et al.(2000) and others reported that the auditor’s partnership profit-sharing pool size has a positive relationship with the auditors’ audit quality. This could be explained that the auditors with partnership’s larger size profit- sharing pools promote more centralized firm-wide quality control efforts to minimize risks of audit failures, which eventually improve the firm-wide audit quality. This study is to find an empirical relationship between certain factors affecting auditors’ quality control systems and audit quality. For this purpose, I used the auditor group variables whether they are (1) subject to FSS’s quality control reviews, (2) under registration with the foreign regulatory authorities, and by (3) auditors’ profit-sharing scheme types (i.e. “One Firm” type vs. “Simple Unity” type, as referred in the Briefing Report for FSS’s Quality Control Reviews released by the Authority in October 2010). I found that the first two factors [(1) and (2)] generally have significantly negative association with (absolute) discretionary accruals of the audited clients. Additional tests by dividing the test variables into Big 4 groups and Non-Big 4 groups also show similar results. Group classification by auditors’ operation types [factor No. (3)] shows significant difference in audit quality only for the case of “One Firm” type Non-Big 4 auditors compared to other Non-Big 4 auditors. These results generally supports the propositions of this study that auditors’ requirement for (1) FSS’s quality control review, (2) registration with foreign regulatory authorities and (3) auditors’ profit-sharing scheme types would have positive relationship with the better audit quality, and also provide certain policy implications with respect to FSS’s auditor quality control review program to consider voluntary quality control efforts of auditors. The contribution of this study is to empirically find that the auditors' quality control factors have positive association with deterrence of earnings management of the audited clients. Especially, the above three variables used in this paper are different from the ones tested by the previous researches, which include the results of quality control peer-reviews conducted by the AICPA or the KICPA(Casterella et al. 2006; Gunny and Zhang 2009; Kwon et al. 2010), the results of independent investigations by PCAOB as well as peer review(Hilary and Lennox 2005) or the third party governmental division’s quality control review(Deis and Giroux 1992). Similarly with this study, Krishnan and Schauer(2000) used peer-review dummy variables, but it is still different from this study in a sense that I used public regulator dummy such as FSS’s quality control review or foreign regulatory authority registration. Accordingly, this study’s results would potentially provide another auditor quality proxies for future researches.