Audit staff turnover, audit effort and audit quality

초록

This study examines how audit staff turnover is associated with audit effort and audit quality. Auditing is conducted by an audit team. Individual auditors generally do not work in isolation. Prior studies on auditing have been generally conducted at the audit firm level and the individual auditors level as the unit of analysis. Because an audit team is a hierarchical assemblage of individuals, who perform a discrete part of the audit process for the most appropriate audit opinion, communication and knowledge sharing among team members is vital to an effective and efficient audit. The empirical results are as follows. First, the empirical results reveal that there is a positive relationship between the audit staff turnover and total audit hours. Second, we find that the audit staff turnover is negatively related to audit quality. Additionally, for observations with positive abnormal audit fees, there is no significant association between the audit staff turnover and audit quality, showing that in case the audit team additionally takes more time, the negative relations are less. The contribution of this study is as follows. First, this research concentrates on audit teams and documents the audit staff turnover is associated with audit hours and audit quality, which responds to calls for more research on the audit process and the audit team interactions. Second, the potential availability of the audit staff turnover indicator may help investors to focus on the audit process and evaluate the audit quality with disclosed data. © 2020, Korean Accounting Association. All rights reserved.

키워드