회계법인의 내부심리업무와 감사품질

This study examines the association between the work of Quality & Risk Management (QRM) and audit quality. Specifically, the relation between discretionary accruals and audit report lag as a proxy for QRM activities, i.e. audit efforts from the perspective of an audit firm. Audit engagement consists of two stages：the first one is field work stage and the second is follow－up stage. In the field work stage, the efforts of an engagement team can be focused. The review for audit documentation by an engagement team and the department of QRM in an audit firm is performed in the follow－up stage. Audit report lag is defined as the period from audit report date to disclosure date on audit report. The audit report lag can be prolonged by the fact that QRM could not agree the opinion by the engagement team. After addressing these matters, audit reports can be released. Therefore, the aggregated efforts by an audit firm can be measured only after incorporating audit reporting lag as well as audit hours. The empirical result is that QRM activities in an audit firm are positively related with its audit quality. The result is robust to several additional tests. Previous studies using audit hours as a proxy for audit efforts are limited by the fact that audit hours mostly reflect the efforts of an audit engagement team only. Another side of audit efforts such as QRM activities cannot be reflected on the audit hours. This study extends prior research on audit quality by examining the incremental effect of QRM activities after controlling for audit hours. The result of this study suggests that further audit efforts from the perspective of an audit firm can improve its audit quality.