재무제표의 비교가능성과 피감기업 감사복잡성 상호작용이 감사노력에 미치는 영향

This study investigates the effect of the interaction between financial statement comparability and complexity of client firms on the effort level that auditors put into the client during the audit process. The accounting system can be defined as a mapping of underlying economic events to financial statements. Two firms are regarded as having similar accounting systems if they produce comparable financial statements given the same set of economic events (DeFranco et al. 2011; Barth et al. 2012). When financial statements are comparable, users of the information can use it and understand the economic substances underlying the statements. It is because the comparability enable the users to compare the information contained in the statements more easily with those of other firms. These predictions imply that information asymmetry and uncertainty decrease as a result of more comparable information (DeFranco et al. 2011). Prior studies on the financial statement comparability generally document the findings which are consistent with these predictions. For example, DeFranco et al. (2011) report that accuracy of earnings forecasts issued by financial analysts is positively associated with the comparability of the firm, while the dispersion of the forecasts is negatively associated with the comparability. Besides, DeFranco et al.‘s (2011) study is monumental in that it develops an empirical way to measure the comparability empirically. Subsequent studies start to apply the measure in various settings. For example, Campbell and Yeung (2012) document that the detrimental impact of an industry peer’s restatement announcement on the stock price increases with the comparability. Choi et al. (2013) report that investors are better able to predict future earnings of firms with comparable financial statements and use the predictions in setting current stock prices. As a result, the magnitude of future earnings coefficient is positively related to the comparability. There are other lines of research that demonstrates the effect of comparability (e.g., DeFond et al. 2011; Fang et al. 2012; Chen et al. 2013; Kim et al. 2013).