최대주주 변경 및 변경유형에 따른 감사인의 위험평가 및 재량적 발생액

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the auditor’s risk assessment and discretionary accruals for the change of firm’s largest shareholder, and to present policy implications for the capital market. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between firm’s largest shareholder change and the type of change (number of changes, reasons for change, CEO turnover, whether or not the stake is increased and whether to change to corporate shareholders), audit fees, audit hours, and discretionary accruals. The summary of the empirical results for domestic listed companies f rom 2011 to 2019 is as follows. First, for all firm-years, a positive relationship was found between the change of the firm’s largest shareholder and audit fees and audit hours. This shows that auditors consider the change of the largest shareholder as an audit risk due to deterioration in management stability and reflect it in the risk assessment. Second, as a result of analyzing the relationship between the change type of the largest shareholder and the audit fees and audit hours, third-party allocation among the reasons for the change and the increase in the equity ratio after the change showed positive correlation with audit hours, and manager turnover was positively related to audit fees. However, there was no significant relationship between other types and audit fees and hours. This implies that, unlike the auditor’s view of the change of the largest shareholder as a significant risk, auditors do not clearly classified and evaluated the the detailed risk types. Third, the largest shareholder change event showed a significant negative correlation with discretionary accruals, indicating a downward earnings management according to the involvement of the largest shareholder. Fourth, among the types of changes to the largest shareholder, only manager turnover has a significant negative relationship with discretionary accruals, suggesting that the simultaneous replacement of the largest shareholder and management is related to a downward earnings management such as Big Bath. This study has contribution that presented the change of the largest shareholder, which is known to have high risk in previous studies, by type from the viewpoint of the auditor’s risk assessment. According to this study, it was found that the auditors evaluated the change of the largest shareholder as major risk factors, indicating significant changes in governance structure and management instability, but did not evaluate them in detail. In addition, there is a possibility that financial reporting quality may deteriorate without the auditor’s detailed risk assessment process, such as the possibility of earnings management when the manager is replaced concurrently. In this context, investors and regulators need to pay attention to the largest shareholder change event.