2017년 신외감법 등 회계개혁법안과 감사품질

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the 2017 Accounting Reform Act in Korea will have a substantial effect on improving audit quality. To this end, the audit quality system of Defond and Zhang (2014) was adopted as a structure for evaluating the accounting reform. This is because their system structured the audit quality into the demand factor of the audit client, the supply factor of the auditor, and the influence factor of the regulatory author- ity, and presented the basis for understanding the audit quality, the purpose of the accounting reform. As the first result of the evaluation, the change in the purpose of external audit and the expansion of the company subject to external audit will induce the auditor to be free from self-review threats such as preparing the financial statements of the audit client, and indirectly do the audit client to strengthen their capacity for inde- pendent accountability, which results in the improvement of audit quality. And the expansion of external audit to limited companies is expected to create minimal incentives for audit quality demand by regulations. Second, the strengthened auditor attestation for the internal control over financial reporting will help resolve the informa- tion asymmetry between the management and investors & creditors over the internal control and strengthen the company’s capacity to manage the internal control. Third, the measure that gave the audit committee the right to appoint an external auditor is expected to check in advance the behaviors to undermine the quality of the audit, such as opinion shopping and low balling, between the management accountable to financial statement preparation and the external auditor. Fourth, the mandatory auditor change on a rotational basis is expected to significantly improve the issue of auditor independence due to the employment relationship between the auditor and the audit client even though the problem of audit failure due to the replacement of an auditor with insuffi- cient experience and expertise is pointed out. In addition, considering the risk of audit failure, there is a concern that a problem of strengthening the market power of Big N accounting firms may arise in the process of favoring a verified auditor with a certain level of audit capability. Fifth, the auditor registration system will allow listed corporations to be audited only by accounting firms that have personnel, physical equipment, psychological systems, compensation systems, and the methods for managing audit quality, which supports auditors’ motives for supplying audit quality. Lastly, the expansion of non-audit services prohibited from concurrently providing with the audit service, is evaluated as a measure to strengthen the incentive to supply audit quality, which is to enhance the independence of auditors. This study is meaningful in that it extracts criteria for improving audit quality from audit-related review studies for the evaluation of the 2017 Accounting Reform Act, and attempts a preliminary evaluation using the results of the empirical studies.