감사인 특성이 경영자-감사인간 의견불일치에 미치는 영향

This study analyzes the effect of the various characteristics of the auditors reported in the accounting firm’s annual report on the audit quality measured by disagreement between management and auditors. Recently, regulators recognized the importance of accounting firms’ annual reports and have required the disclosure of them to the electronic disclosure system (DART) to facilitate access to relevant information, and expanded the scope of disclosure through law amendments. Based on these accounting firms’ annual reports, this study considers audit firm characteristics that could affect audit quality, which are classified into variables related to auditor’s ability(expertise) and auditor independence. We use partner ratio, auditor experience, and number of clients per partner as variables related to auditor’s ability. Then we use audit fee per partner, accounting firm debt ratio, and reserve for compensation ratio as variables related to auditor’s independence. In previous studies, audit quality was often measured by discretionary accrual, financial statement error correction or audit opinion, which uses financial statements, the output of external audits. However by the conceptual definition, audit quality should be the corrected earning during the audit process. In this study, we use more direct measure to measure audit quality, which is management-auditor disagreement. In Korea, it is mandated to disclosure the earning before external audit process if the firm expects the sales, operating income or net income to change more than 30% compared to previous year (15% if large firms). We use this earning before external audits as preliminary earning, and calculate the management-audit disagreement by deducting it from reported earning after external audits. Using the KOSPI listed firm-years from 2011-2017, we examine the relation between various characteristics of auditors and management-auditor disagreement. As a result of analysis, we find that audit quality as measured by management- auditor disagreement are positively associated with partner ratio. accountant experience is partially related, and the number of clients per partner is negatively associated. This implies that audit quality enhances as auditors’ ability increase. In addition, the higher audit fee per partner, the less management-auditor disagreement is. This results may indicates that the higher audit fee, which could lead auditors more economically subordinate to the client, makes independent audits difficult. Another measures related to the auditor's independence, the liability ratio and the liability reserve ratio, are not statistically significant to the audit quality. This study provides evidence on the validity of the regulators' policy to expand the disclosure of recent annual reports by showing that the information in the accounting firm's annual report is related to actual audit quality, using more direct measure. Also, this study contributes to the investors by enhancing the users’ understanding on the various information disclosed in the accounting firms’ annual report and providing criteria for the investors’ preliminary assessment of the audit quality. This study has some caveats. First, the results may be biased because the sample is limited to the firms which disclosure the preliminary earning. Second, we acknowledge that each firms’ specific auditor characteristic could be better proxy than current audit firms’ average characteristics, which we could not perform due to data unavailability. Future studies could extend the study if the disclosure of auditor information is extended.