Does Chinese individual auditors’ issuance of modified audit opinions reflect their audit conservatism?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is motivated by the aim of assessing the effectiveness of using modified audit opinions (MAOs) as a widely adopted measure of audit quality in existing research. We examine whether individual auditors’ propensity to issue MAOs (PIMAO) is mainly attributable to their audit conservatism or client quality. We select a sample of client-year observations with no modified audit opinions (non-MAO clients) from China and perform a series of regression analyses on individual auditors’ PIMAO using five different client quality measures: the predicted probability of receiving MAOs, signed abnormal accruals, absolute abnormal accruals, small profit, and non-operating income. We find that clients of individual auditors with high PIMAO (high-PIMAO auditors) exhibit higher signed and absolute abnormal accruals and higher non-operating income than clients of individual auditors with low PIMAO (low-PIMAO auditors). In addition, the predicted probability of receiving MAOs and the likelihood of small profit are not lower for clients of high-PIMAO auditors compared to clients of low-PIMAO auditors. These findings indicate that clients of high-PIMAO auditors generally exhibit lower quality, consistent with the notion that Chinese individual auditors’ PIMAO is mainly attributed to client quality rather than audit conservatism. Our study provides implications for both auditing research and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it