Office Size of Big 4 Auditors and Client Restatements
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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
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- Teacher spread
- 0.256 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
Francis and Yu (2009) and Choi, Kim, Kim, and Zang (2010) report evidence that Big 4 audits are of higher quality when the engagement office is of larger size. Specifically, client earnings quality is higher and auditors in larger offices are more likely to issue going‐concern audit reports. We extend this line of research to test if larger Big 4 offices have fewer client restatements. A client restatement provides more direct evidence of a low‐quality audit than earnings quality metrics or going‐concern reports, because a restatement indicates the client's auditor did not effectively enforce the correct application of GAAP at the time the original financial statements were issued. We analyze 2,557 firm‐year restatements in a sample of 23,190 financial statements originally issued by U.S. firms from 2003 to 2008. We find that Big 4 office size is associated with fewer client restatements after controlling for innate client characteristics that may affect restatements (client size, financial performance, industry membership, nonfinancial measures, off‐balance sheet activities, and market‐related measures), and a set of controls for other auditor factors such as fees and industry expertise. The study raises important questions about the ability of smaller offices to deliver high‐quality audits for SEC registrants.
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The record
- Venue
- Contemporary Accounting Research
- Topic
- Auditing, Earnings Management, Governance
- Field
- Business, Management and Accounting
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- AccountingAuditBusinessQuality auditQuality (philosophy)Earnings managementBalance sheetSample (material)Big FourEarnings qualityEarningsTest (biology)Accrual
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes