Abstract

Audit practice is a team effort led by signing auditors. We examine the impact of the heterogeneity of signing auditors’ audit-firm serving experiences on the disclosure of key audit matters (KAMs). Auditors with more heterogeneous serving experiences demonstrate more adequate KAM disclosure, as evidenced by more KAMs, longer texts and clearer attributions in their disclosures. This effect is influenced by the quality of audit knowledge that auditors accumulate from different serving experiences and the team- and audit-firm-level knowledge integration environment. Furthermore, signing auditors with more diverse service experience tend to improve audit quality, reduce the incidence of restatement or misconduct and enhance the informativeness of financial reports. Our findings enrich the KAM disclosure research and provide insights into audit firms’ human resource allocation and internal management.

Introduction

In 2016, China’s Ministry of Finance mandated new audit report standards, introducing Key Audit Matters sections in listed companies’ audit reports to bolster transparency and highlight financial statement risks through auditors’ judgment ( Chen et al., 2021 ). Studying the disclosure of key audit matters (KAMs) is pivotal for enriching the content of audit report information and nurturing capital market health ( Reid et al., 2015 , Wang et al., 2018 , Li et al., 2019 ). Research predominantly examines the economic consequences of KAM disclosure ( Wang and Li, 2019 , Liu and Lei, 2020 , Zhou et al., 2020b ). Only a few studies investigate the determinants of KAM disclosure, with major focuses on client characteristics ( Pinto and Morais, 2019 ; Li et al., 2020; Qian et al., 2022 ), individual auditor attributes ( Cao, 2021 , Chen et al., 2021 ), client–auditor relationships ( Hu and Hu, 2021 ) and abnormal audit fees ( Chen et al., 2022 ). Audit practice is inherently team work, with the leading signing auditors critically influencing team efficiency ( Jiang and Tang, 2016 , Yan et al., 2017 ). In the context of integrated management within accounting firms, exploring effective personnel allocation for audit teams is important for promoting the integration of internal resources within organizations and driving the audit market toward intrinsic, high-quality development. We investigate how the heterogeneity of signing auditors’ audit-firm serving experience affects KAM disclosure from a team theory perspective. 1

Auditing is a profession characterized by a relatively high turnover rate, with auditors often transitioning between audit firms ( Hermanson et al., 2016 ). For instance, the Shanghai Institute of Certified Public Accountants announced that in September 2022, 122 certified public accountants in Shanghai handled issues related to transferring to other firms. The professional experiences gained in various firms have a profound impact on individual auditors’ knowledge acquisition and cognitive processes ( Che et al., 2020 , Tian et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, the diversity in the audit-firm serving experiences of signing auditor pairs may influence their knowledge integration, which has implications for their audit judgments ( Carpenter, 2007 , Bonner et al., 2022 ).

Conclusions

In this study, we provide novel empirical evidence on the factors influencing KAM disclosure. We find that signing auditors with more heterogeneous audit-firm serving experiences exhibit more adequate KAM disclosure. Mechanism analysis reveals that the quality of knowledge accumulated from heterogeneous serving experiences and the knowledge integration environment at both the team and firm levels significantly influence the impact of serving experience heterogeneity. Specifically, the increase in KAM disclosure adequacy is more salient when auditors accumulate higher-quality knowledge through heterogeneous serving experiences, when audit teams exhibit educational gaps between members, when review partners have heterogeneous experiences and when audit firms are smaller. Economic consequence tests indicate that signing auditors with greater serving experience heterogeneity can enhance audit quality through more audit input, significantly reduce the probability of restatements and financial misconducts and ultimately enhance the informativeness of accounting information. In other words, such audit teams can improve accounting information quality by thoroughly identifying and addressing potential risks in financial reporting.

We extend the literature on KAM disclosure through a novel investigation of how audit team composition affects the adequacy of such disclosure. Our findings offer valuable implications for practice. In the realm of integrated audit firm management, human resource management is pivotal for audit firms’ internal governance. Managers need to consider the proper allocation of human resources from the perspective of auditor team composition. By leveraging differentiated serving experiences within audit teams, they can adjust member configurations, enhance communication and cooperation among team members, better harness their teams’ collective intelligence and improve internal governance mechanisms and quality management systems. Regulatory bodies are encouraged to encourage audit teams to embrace diverse decision-making frameworks. This shift will aid audit firms in transitioning from a growth-centric to a strength-based approach and promote the healthy development of capital markets.