비정상 감사보수는 감사원가의 대가인가?：원가비대칭성 모형으로 살펴본 비정상 감사보수의 성격

[Purpose]This study focuses on possible inducements of abnormal audit fees. An auditor may bear the risks of performing more audit procedures and expend more efforts due to the difference of timing between the audit contract and the actual audit work. Therefore, the auditors, when determining the audit fee, need to consider occurrence of unexpected factors and environment that the firm may face subsequent to signing of the audit contract. Especially, earnings deterioration, such as decrease of sales, causes the auditor to extend the audit scope and provide more audit efforts due to decrease of materiality threshold and valuation or impairment of assets. However, audit fee functions as a constraint for these additional work, because an auditor, in essence, seeks interests and can not commit infinite amount of resources to a single firm. Under this circumstances, abnormal audit fee could be interpreted as proxies for auditor’s premium of unexpected consuming of resources, because it is calculated as the difference between actual audit fees and predicted audit fees. Therefore, in this study abnormal audit fee is the main constraint for additional audit resources. [Methodology]Since a decline in sales is a major indicator of operating deterioration, cost asymmetry may mean that auditors increase their perception of costs due to the expansion of the scope of audit or additional investment efforts. Therefore, the hypothesis is that if the abnormal audit fee, a limiting factor for additional audit costs, is high, cost asymmetry will be strengthened. To test this hypothesis, we use a sample of 10,712 firm－year observations over the period of 2007－2016, along with the model in Dierynck et al.(2012) similar to that in Anderson et al.(2003) for main analysis, and the model in Homburg and Nasev(2008) for additional analysis. [Findings]The result of this empirical analysis shows that abnormal audit fees generate new asymmetry in total cost and sales management cost, and increase cost in downside elastic and non－operating cost. On the other hand, total audit fees were not asymmetric in any cost category. The results of additional analysis show the same conclusion, therefore supporting the main analyses. [Policy Implications]This research is meaningful in two ways. First, we find that abnormal audit fee is not related with rents of auditors or the relationship between auditors and firm, but is derived from potential audit inputs which signifies audit quality. Second, audit factors also have impact on cost asymmetry and one of its factors is not a just audit fee but an abnormal audit fee.