One of the key reforms aimed at improving audit quality has been the introduction of public oversight over the auditing profession by national public oversight bodies (POBs). The foundation of their strategy is inspections of audit firms. However, little is known about the impact of inspections...

Audit academics and policymakers exhibit continuing concerns about the limited transfer of audit research findings to policymakers. We use knowledge transfer best practices to evaluate eight audit domain specific practices for their potential to transfer audit knowledge. Our analysis shows that...

In early 2017, the PCAOB mandated the disclosure of audit participants, including the lead audit partner and other audit firms participating in the audit (“outside auditors”). In this study, we leverage this unique setting to examine whether investors find auditor identity useful. Using...

In May 2007, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson announced the Department of Treasury was establishing the Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession (ACAP) to consider and develop recommendations relating to the sustainability of the auditing profession. The Advisory Committee was...

Audit regulators frequently describe that auditors lack sufficient professional skepticism, but practitioners argue that these allegations are unsubstantiated. We review SEC audit enforcement actions (AAERs) and PCAOB inspection findings to understand how regulators evaluate skepticism. Our...

Using a dataset of 107 internal auditors, we investigate internal audit functions' (IAF) role in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) matters. We give evidence for organizations' and IAFs' ESG maturity driving ESG reporting, while IAFs' involvement in ESG drives assurance of ESG reports....

We examine whether corporate pension plans of client firms (hereafter, clients) influence auditors' decisions on audit pricing for the clients in the U.S. We find that, on average, auditors charge higher fees for auditing financial statements of client firms sponsoring defined benefits (DB)...

Financial reporting quality has been under scrutiny especially after the collapse of major companies. The main objective of this study is to investigate the audit committee’s effectiveness on the financial reporting quality among the Malaysian GLCs. In particular, the study examined the impact...

We examine the impact of data analytics on audit quality. Using hand-collected information on data analytics skills of employees of audit firms, we find that human capital investment in data analytics improves audit quality. The analytics capability of both frontline and back-office employees...

We investigate whether Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspections affect the quality of internal control audits. Our research design improves on prior studies by exploiting both cross-sectional and time-series variation in the content of PCAOB inspection reports, while also...