경영자와 감사인간 의견불일치가 외부감사에 미친 영향-감사보고시차를 중심으로-

Audit report lag influence the timing of accounting disclosures, and this imposes a burden of additional searching costs for private information on investors in the capital market. This study investigates the effects of auditor-client disagreement over financial reporting on audit report lag. We measure the auditor-client disagreement as the difference of preliminary earnings and reported earnings. The former reflects the intention of the management and the latter, the outcome of negotiation between auditor and management. As this difference gets greater, there are more efforts needed in the audit process both auditor and management and audit report lag becomes longer. The sample is composed of the listed companies which disclose preliminary earnings. We obtained an initial sample of 2,517 preliminary earnings disclosed according to RDLC(Regulation on Disclosure of Listed Companies enforces the firms to timely disclose the material change in the net income compared with prior year) in the period 1/1/2003 to 3/31/2008, individually. We limit sample firms to non-financial firms and delete samples that were unsuitable for the empirical tests. Finally, we use 1,417 firm-year samples in the analysis. The results are summarized as follows:First, the difference between auditor and management is related positively with the audit report lag. This result supports the expectation that the difference between auditor and management affects the audit report lag positively. Additionally accounting policy and audit opinion affect differently on the audit report lag. Management takes accounting policy aggressively, in that preliminary earnings is larger than reported earnings, audit report lag is longer. And firms with qualified, adverse, and disclaimer opinions have longer audit report lag than firms with unqulified opinion.