COVID-19 시기의 해외종속기업에 대한 현장 감사업무와 감사시간 및 연결재무제표 감사품질

We empirically examine the relationships among the number of foreign subsidiaries, audit hours and audit quality of consolidated financial statements when the external audit is affected by COVID-19 pandemic. External auditors usually perform their main tasks in the field (hereafter “on-site audit”), However, external auditors would not have been able to perform on-site audit of foreign subsidiaries during the COVID-19 period. Consequently, we propose that there will be differences in audit hours and audit quality when the number of foreign subsidiaries are higher. We find that audit hours have increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic period but there is a statistically significant negative relationship between audit hours and the number of foreign subsidiaries at this time. Moreover, we also find that there is no significant relationship between audit quality and COVID-19 pandemic. However audit quality is comparatively lower when the number of foreign subsidiaries is relatively higher in this period. According to the above results, our results show that audit hours and audit quality have decreased because it was impossible to perform on-site audit for foreign subsidiaries during the pandemic period. We provide empirical evidence that on-site audit of foreign subsidiaries is important for primary auditors and propose that audit hours and audit quality can be also decreased when on-site audit of foreign subsidiaries has decreased. We also analyzed the output of external audit based on practical changes in on-site audit during the COVID-19 pandemic period.