사립대학 외부감사보고서의 문제점과 개선방안에 관한 연구

In accordance with the 「Notice on External Accounting Audit for Private School Institutions」, external auditors of private universities must conduct financial statement audits and compliance audits. Due to the characteristics of external audits at private universities, there may be audit expectations gap between external auditors and information users. In the field of accounting audit, the audit expectations gap refers to the difference between what users of audit reports expect or demand for audit results and what auditors reasonably expect to be able to perform. Recently, as the Ministry of Education has increased the number of cases pointed out by the Ministry of Education regarding financial management and accounting at private universities, criticism has been raised about the effectiveness of external audit. It is also reasonable to analyze that these criticisms occurred because the audit costs and audit period that universities spend for external accounting audits were not sufficient. However, it may be because the external auditor’s audit report was not sufficient, resulting in a difference in expectations. The purpose of this study is to narrow the audit expectations gap caused by external audit reports by identifying problems in audit reports of private universities and suggesting improvement plans. In order to achieve this purpose, the laws and documents related to private universities were reviewed to identify problems in audit reports of private universities. By reviewing these laws and literature, we analyzed the difference between the audit reports of private universities and for-profit corporations. In this study, the problems of the current audit report are inconsistency between audit reports and audit contracts, misunderstanding of reasonable assurance, inherent limitations of audit due to audit sampling audit, expansion of auditor’s scope of responsibility according to compliance audit, and ethical responsibility. In this study, the improvement plans for audit reports of private universities were presented in detail as follows so that information users can clearly recognize the auditor’s responsibility for the the financial statements audit and compliance audit. The improvements for private university audit reports presented in this study referred to the format of standard audit reports stipulated in the audit standards. First, 「Notice on External Accounting Audit of Private School Institutions」 should be deleted from the conduct standards for financial statement audit. Second, the rationale for ethical responsibility, including compliance with the ethical requirements of Korea related to financial statement auditing, must be clearly presented. Third, in the report on the requirements of other laws and regulations, the phrase “whether there are any violations of laws or irregularities that can directly affect important amounts and disclosures in financial statements” must be deleted. Fourth, emphasis of matters should be added to provide useful information to information users. Fifth, the auditor’s responsibilities in a financial statement audit should include the purpose of audit and limits based on reasonable assurance so that information users can understand the limitations of financial statement audits. In this study, a method to improve audit reports of private universities was presented in detail so that information users could clearly recognize the auditor’s responsibility in a financial statements audit audit and compliance audit. The standards of conduct and scope of financial statement audits and compliance audits are different, and the level of assurance of audit opinions expressed in financial statement audits and opinions confirming legal violations and fraudulent matters prepared by conducting compliance audits are different. Information users may be misled if audit opinions and laws and regulations violation reports are presented together in one report. There is no provision in the auditing standards that prohibits separate issuance of a financial statement audit report and a report for other legal requirements. In this study, a financial statement audit report and a report on law violations irregularities were published separately to suggest an improvement plan that can reduce the gap in expectations between external auditors and information users. In this way, if the compliance audit report is attached after the financial statement audit report, the audit expectations gap between external auditors and information users will be narrowed. 「Notice on External Accounting Audit of Private School Institutions」 presents the private academy institution’s audit certificate and audit contract signing form in an attached form, but this study presented problems with these types and suggested improvement plans. First, since the certificate can not disclose any opinion and must contain only facts, the name of the audit certificate of private academic institution should be changed to the independent auditor’s audit report. Second, the audit hours stated in the audit contract report is not the actual audit hours, but the estimated audit hours by the auditor at the hours of the audit signing. Accordingly, the contract’s execution must be changed to include the scheduled audit hours. Third, in order to introduce the standard audit hours system, it is necessary to collect the actual audit hours, so when submitting the audit report, the actual audit hours and audit fees should be reported. In addition, the amendments of other laws were not reflected in a timely manner, so the provisions of 「Notice on External Accounting Audit of Private School Institutions」 suggested matters requiring revision. In this study, the name of the revised law was presented, and an improvement plan to correct the incorrectly written legal provisions was presented. This study has a contribution in that it analyzes the problems of external audit reports of private universities in order to resolve the audit expectations gap and suggests improvement plans related to them. If a survey is conducted on the perception of audit reports targeting information users in future researches, it will be possible to suggest additional improvements based on the difference in expectations.