감사파트너 기중변경과 감사시간･감사보수･감사품질의 관련성: 표준감사시간 운영에 고려사항

The Standard Audit Hours System under the revised External Audit Law effective in 2017 is based on the assumption that high audit hours are related with high audit quality, and is supporting the arguments that the past audit hours not reaching the appropriate level need to be increased to the Standard audit hours. However, since there are various causes increasing audit hours, it is necessary to consider these factors when evaluating the appropriateness of actual audit hours as to be compared with the standard audit hours. In this study, we consider the “mid-year audit partner change” variable as one of these considerations. For the purpose, the ‘Audit Partner Head Count’ data was manually collected from the external audit details attached to the external auditor’s audit report. According to the data, if the number of audit partner in charge of the audit is reported in more than one, it could be interpreted as the audit engagement partner has been changed in the middle of the audit year. Based on this data, this study investigates the relations of the mid-year audit partner changes with audit hours, audit fees and audit quality to be considered when aggregating actual audit hours. Results of the study show that the mid-year changes of audit partners are associated with the audit hours significantly higher than those of the single audit partner participation. However, such association was not found with respect to total audit fees; therefore, hourly audit fees are significantly lower for the mid-year audit partners changed clients. On the other hand, the discretionary accruals between the two sample groups of the mid-year audit partner changes and no audit partner change clients were not significantly different. It is found that, with respect to the difference of audit hours and hourly audit fees between two group samples, such significant difference is arising between one and two audit partner samples, and incremental audit hour increases and hourly audit fee decreases are not significant when audit partner head counts increase to three and four partners. On the other hand, in the additional analysis in which the auditor samples were divided into Big and non-Big audit firm groups, the above results appeared differently across the audit firms size sample groups. The results of this study raise the needs to consider causes of various audit hours differences, such as mid-year audit partner change, with respect to the Standard Audit Hours System. Specifically, this study provides empirical evidence on the mid-year audit partner changes as a variable of the estimation model of the Standard Audit Hours System. i.e. the mid-year audit partner change causing audit hour increase should be included when analyzing the actual audit hours, but should be excluded from the standard audit hour estimation model based on it. This paper provides a practical contribution by suggesting that the mid-year audit partner changes should be an additional variable to be considered for determining the Standard Audit Hours and for evaluating the actual audit hours as compared to the Standard Audit Hours.