In the past six years, the average number of industries (2-digit SIC) serviced by audit offices in the United States has grown by 20% and the number of industries where the office has specialization has fallen by 40% (Data Source: Audit Analytics). This suggests a trend away from specialization...

This paper investigates whether the provision of non-audit services (NAS) to audit clients impairs auditor independence of mind and independence in appearance. The main contributions of this paper are in terms of its timeliness with respect to regulatory changes, the simultaneous examination of...

Recent proposals on audit regulation, whether in the EU or by the PCAOB, have been motivated by efforts to increase audit quality. However, there does not exist any generally agreed upon definition of audit quality. This paper aims to critically assess the status quo of the discussion regarding...

In this paper, we document 45 specific allegations related to audit deficiencies based on GAAS, as detailed in 141 AAERs and 153 securities class action lawsuits over the violation years 1978–2016. Next, we use these allegations to validate existing popular proxies of audit quality. Of all the...

The paper examines the extent which risk management committee and corporate governance committee predict audit fees in Nigeria. We employed random panel data (unbalance) regression analysis to establish whether risk management committee and corporate governance committee affect audit fees. We...

Consulting service lines have again become a focus for the Big 4 accounting firms. Since SOX prohibits the provision of many types of non-audit services to audit clients, this means firms and many of their clients must likely choose between an audit and a consulting relationship. We use a...

To understand the implications of decentralized ledger technology for financial reporting and auditing, we analyze auditor competition, audit quality, client misstatements, and regulatory policy all in a unified framework. We demonstrate how collaborative auditing using a federated blockchain...

A sudden surge of competition following audit privatisation in the Iranian audit market may create some positive or negative consequences on audit quality. Such significant accounting reform occurred in the unfavourable audit market of Iran where the demand for high quality audit services as...

Despite the huge audit pricing literature, there is a dearth of evidence on the temporal dynamics of audit fee adjustments and the persistence of audit prices. Based on a sample of 76,867 panel observations for a sample of UK listed and unlisted companies audited by the big 4 over the period...