기업의 전략변화도와 감사보수

Business strategy is a characteristic that affects the overall operation of a company, including its organizational structure and corporate culture. A management strategy is not a permanent concept that remains unchanged once established by management, but a fluid concept that the entity constantly changes to adapt to and grow in the environment. Strategic change cause changes in organizational structure across the firm, increasing new types of transactions and disclosures. Therefore, the information contained in financial statements is different from the previous period and may be less useful. In addition, since members of the firm tend to stick to the previous strategy when implementing the strategic change, managers tend to justify the strategic change by improving the performance of the strategic change. At this time, auditors may evaluate strategic change as a factor that increases its audit risk and will expand the scope of the audit to address the increased risk of material misrepresentation and to reduce the audit risk below acceptable level. In other words, auditors may increase their audit fee to respond to audit risks. This study analyzed the impact of strategic changes on audit fee for firms listed on KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets from 2005 to 2016. As a result, audit fee increases as strategic changes increase. These results confirm that external auditors require additional compensation for audit risks by determining strategic changes that cause changes across the enterprise as a factor that increases audit risk. And the positive effect of the strategic change on audit fee has been shown to be strengthened as auditors are industrial specialist. This meant that firms with high audit risk would require a premium due to signals that they were providing high-quality financial statements when appointing an industry specialist auditor, thus confirming the industry specialist auditor's audit fee strategy for companies with high audit risk. This results of the analysis were robust in controlling the endogenesis of the auditor's choice. And Additional analysis showed that audit hour increased as strategic changes increased. Therefore, the main analysis confirms that the increase in audit fee as strategic changes increase is the result of auditors recognizing the increase in strategic changes and injecting additional audit efforts to lower audit risks below acceptable levels. In addition, it can be confirmed that the request of an industry expert to pay an additional high audit fee for a firm with a high degree of strategic change is not the result of the additional audit effort, but the result of the request for a remuneration premium for its reputation as an industry specialist auditor. The results of this study revealed that the level of strategic change, is an important factor affecting the auditor's audit risk assessment and audit fee, thereby enhancing the auditor to understand the risk assessment and to present the change in corporate strategy as one of the characteristics that should be considered in the study on audit fee. In addition, the results of this study suggest that auditors are actively assessing audit risk to improve audit quality and improve the reliability of financial information.