연구개발비 회계처리에 대한 테마감리의 효과: 제약·바이오 산업을 중심으로

This study investigates whether and how bio-pharmaceutical firms’ R&D accounting and the value relevance of these firms’ R&D-related information have changed following the Financial Supervisory Service’s thematic audit review of the R&D accounting. Analyzing Korean listed firms for the period 2015-2019, we find that the R&D capitalization ratio of bio-pharmaceutical firms has been significantly reduced after the audit review. This effect takes place since 2017 when the Financial Supervisory Service released the advance notice regarding the thematic audit review and persists in 2018-2019 due to the release of the supervision guidance in 2018. Investigating changes in the value relevance of R&D information, we find that the value relevance of capitalized R&D expenditures has improved following the thematic review. In additional cross-sectional analyses, the results show that the effect of the audit review is more pronounced for firms with higher pre-audit review capitalization ratio and firms with lower financial reporting quality. We also show that while firms with strong incentives to use a discretion in R&D accounting used to opportunistically capitalize R&D expenditures, such behavior was no longer observed in the post-review period. Collectively, these findings suggest that despite the concern that the audit review would excessively limits firms’ discretion and flexibility in R&D accounting, the informativeness of R&D capitalization has increased.