기업의 횡령⋅배임 공시와 감사보고시차의 관계

This study examines whether the disclosure of asset embezzlement affects audit report lags. Auditor can evaluate high audit risk for firms that have disclosed the asset embezzlement. Specifically, this study distinguishes audit report lags into four components which are reporting lag, fieldwork lag, fieldwork days and file lag. Using Audit report which is publicly disclosed under External Audit Act, we find that the disclosure of asset embezzlement is positively associated with scheduling lag and fieldwork days, resulting in longer fieldwork lag. These results indicate that auditors put more efforts to a client disclosing asset embezzlement with the results of longer fieldwork lag. However, the disclosure of asset embezzlement does not have a significant association with reporting lag and file lag, indicating that longer fieldwork lag arising from auditor’s incremental efforts does not necessarily lead to the delay in auditor’s report issuance. These findings persist after the several robustness tests. Collectively, our results show that auditors strategically react to the disclosure of asset embezzlement and do not delay audit report. This study extends literature on audit report lags by studying with individual components of audit report lags. By doing so, we can distinguish the effect of factors on each audit report lag. Our paper shows that it is necessary to deliberately define the audit report lags according to the research subject. Our results also show that external auditors’ strategic response to the disclosure of asset embezzlement. Therefore, the disclosure of asset embezzlement is used as an information to external auditors.