Are Audit Firms' Compensation Policies Associated with Audit Quality?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We examine how compensation policies of audit firms are associated with audit quality. Specifically, we investigate the effects of the ratio of variable to fixed compensation and the size of the basis for profit sharing (i.e., whether partners share profits in a small or in a large profit pool). For our analyses, we use detailed mandatory disclosure of the compensation policies in German audit firms. We document that compensation policies vary considerably across audit firms. We find that profit sharing in a small profit pool and high variable compensation are two characteristics of auditor compensation associated with lower audit quality. We also find some evidence suggesting that audit quality may be most at risk in cases in which partners rely more heavily on variable compensation to divide a relatively small profit pool. In additional analyses, we find that these associations are more pronounced in medium‐sized audit firms. We argue that this finding may result from these firms being too large for audit partners to directly monitor each other effectively, yet simultaneously too small to have sophisticated centralized monitoring systems in place. Finally, we find that integrating partner‐specific, nonprofit‐related performance metrics into the compensation structure mitigates the adverse effects of small profit pools and high variable compensation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".