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论新审计报告准则的影响及其实施问题
Costs and Benefits of Reporting Key Audit Matters in the Audit Report: The French Experience
Jean Beacute;dard, Nathalie Gonthier-Besacier, Alain Schatt
Abstract
This article presents original results on the effects of the justification of assessments (JOA), which are mandatory in France since 2003. These JOA are similar to Key Audit Matters that might be disclosed by auditors around the world in a near future, in order to enhance the informative value of auditorsrsquo; reports. Our results show that the disclosure of additional information by French auditors has very limited effects. On the one hand, the financial market does not react significantly to these JOA. On the other hand, the quality of the audit (proxied by a measure of earnings management), the cost of the audit (proxied by audit fees) and the efficiency of the audit (proxied by the audit report lag) are not significantly affected by the JOA. Finally, our results confirm the idea that the disclosure of additional information by the auditors rather has a symbolic value than an informative value. However, it is likely that our results might be different in other institutional contexts, especially in contexts where the auditors liability is not similar, or in contexts where auditors not only disclose clean opinions. Thus, our results allow enriching the current international debate on the introduction of Key Audit Matters.
Introduction
The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB 2013) and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB 2013) have recently proposed for public comment new auditing standards that would require auditors to communicate in the audit report “Key Audit Matters” (KAM) specific to the audit. These changes in audit reporting aimed at reducing the information gap – differences between the information users desire and what is available to them through the entitylsquo;s disclosures and the auditorrsquo;s report (IAASB 2011).
There is no evidence yet on whether a requirement for auditors to communicate additional information will increase the communicative value of the audit report and reduce the information asymmetry that exists between company management and investors. Indeed, there are concerns about these communications. Over time, they may become boilerplate (IAASB 2012a; Footprint Consultants 2011), liability concerns may results in auditors reporting on as few matters as possible or providing a lengthy list of redundant disclosures (IAASB 2012a), the disclosures may not be easily understandable because of the use of technical language (Footprint Consultants 2011), they may result in excessive other reporting that might cause the auditorlsquo;s report to be ambiguous (IAASB 2011), and in additional cost with questionable benefit (IAASB 2012a).
The idea of auditor disclosure of key audit matters is not completely new. In France, since 2003, auditors must provide commentaries, called “Justification of Assessments” (JOA), in their report. JOA are very similar to key audit matters in that they must “enable the user of the report to obtain a better understanding of the reasons behind the statutory auditorsrsquo; opinion on the financial statements” (Haut Conseil des Commissaires aux Comptes 2006). As for the key audit matters they are disclosed in separate section after the audit report and when applicable, refer to the relevant financial statement accounts and disclosures that relate to the disclosed matter.
This study aims to assess some of the benefits and costs of such JOA. In order to do so, we create a database of 953 annual reports of large French listed companies, for the period 2000-2011. In a first step, we study the reaction of the French financial market at the announcement of the JOAs. Our results show that the market reaction is not more different since the disclosure of the JOAs. Therefore, we conclude that the information content of such reports is low for investors.
In a second step, to better understand the reaction of the financial market, we focus on three aspects of the audit: its quality, its cost and its efficiency. First, the quality of the audit, which is proxied by a measure of earnings management, is not affected by the introduction of the JOA in France. In other words, it seems that the auditor does not provide additional efforts other than those of writing one or two additional pages. Second, the cost of the audit, proxied by audit fees, is not significantly modified by the JOA. Therefore, the quality/cost ratio of audit services is not really modified by the introduction of JOA in France. Third, the efficiency of the audit, proxied by the audit report lag, is however slightly affected by the introduction of the JOA. Overall, these results on the three dimensions of the audit (quality, efficiency and cost) help to understand the absence of a reaction of the French financial market to the JOAs.
These results contribute to enrich the academic literature. We confirm that additional disclosures by auditors have no informative content (no reaction of the financial market) and do not affect the key characteristics of the audit (quality, efficiency, cost). Therefore, we confirm that the content of an audit report, even more detailed, remains essentially symbolic (Church et al. 2008; Mock et al. 2013). Besides, our results allow enriching the current international debates on the introduction of KAM. Because we find that more detailed audit reports are of limited value in France, we consider that it is likely that the effect of the introduction of KAM will be extremely limited in similar countries. However, it is possible that in other institutional contexts the introduction of KAM may have more pronounced effects. Il is notably the case in countries wh
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