감사숙련도에 따른 감사품질의 차이: 표준감사시간에서 직급별 시간당 보수 비율을 사용한 숙련도 조정 방안 검토

The external audit laws of Korea as revised in 2017 explicitly include a provision about standard audit hours which reflects audit input to ensure that auditors exert sufficient audit hours in audits. However, this stipulation about standard audit hours raises an important question with respect to the consideration of auditor grade mix in audit teams. Our study is motivated to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between audit quality and auditor’s proficiency-adjusted standard audit hours based on differential billing rates of each grade of labor used in practice. We find that proficiency-adjustments to audit hours vary with the comparative billing rate of each grade. However, irrespective of the choice of the different translation rate, actual audit hours are significantly associated with discretionary accruals, but proficiency-adjustments are not. Audit firm size combined with proficiency-adjustments also has limited impacts on audit quality. i.e. high actual audit hours of both Big and non-Big audit firm clients exhibit a significant association with audit quality, but audit firm size makes a limited difference in the significance (significant for actual hours in all samples only). Our results that proficiency-adjustment hours are not always related to audit quality whereas the magnitude of actual audit hours is, provide useful insights to practitioners and regulators.