감사인의 독립성 유착위협과 압력위협이 감사품질에 미치는 효과

According to the Code of Ethics, auditors’ independence is potentially affected by self-interest, self-review, advocacy, familiarity and intimidation threats. Self-interest, self-review and advocacy threats are eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level by laws and regulations, however, these safeguards are not effectively to reduce the familiarity and intimidation threats to an acceptable level. Because familiarity threat may be incurred due to a long tenure or close relationship such as, alumni relationship and the regional relation between auditors and audit client. Intimidation threat also may be occurred due to the actual or perceived pressures in the context of audit market competition. Audit clients are able to choose and change their auditors which resulted in inequality relationship between audit clients and auditors in the process of negotiating audit fees. This study focused on the effect of audit quality on familiarity and intimidation threats which cannot be eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level by the law and regulations. Korean non-financial companies, whose fiscal year ended as of December 31, listed on Korean Stock Exchange from 2003 to 2012 are selected to evaluate the effect of audit quality on familiarity and intimidation treats to auditors’ independence. Familiarity threat was measured with the ratio of non-audit service fees to total fees and intimidation threat was measured with the ratio of abnormal audit fees to actual audit fees. Discretionary accruals was used as proxy of audit quality. First, there is no significant relationship between familiarity threat and discretionary accruals. This study result implies that familiarity threat may not only compromise auditor independence but also have positive effect on audit quality, because auditor has better understanding about audit client in the environment which familiarity threat was created. Second, intimidation threat has significant and positive relationship with discretionary accruals measured with performance-adjusted modified Jones model. This statement implies that intimidation threat has negative effect on audit quality. Third, familiarity threat has a significant and positive relationship with discretionary accrual measured with performance-adjusted modified Jones model in high intimidation threat group. This fact indicates that familiarity threat, not by itself, occurred with intimation threat simultaneously has negative effect on audit quality. Lastly, we expected that intimidation threat would have negative effect on audit quality in high familiarity threat, but we did not identify any evidence to support our expectation. The result from this study can be interpreted as evidence that recent discussion about the need to increase audit fees in Korean market is not the auditors’ selfish interest. In addition, this study suggests the implication for accounting regulation to the law makers and regulators. Regulators should focus on developing regulations for the group which shows high intimidation threat to improve the audit quality. However, intimidation threat was expected to have negative effect on audit quality in high familiarity threat but, in fact, it was not. This unexpected relationship should be studied in detail as research topic in a near future.