مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیر خدمات مشاوره ای بر کیفیت حسابرسی – وایلی ۲۰۱۸

We use experimental markets to examine whether providing consulting services to a nonaudit client impacts audit quality. Our paper directly addresses concerns raised by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board that the largest public accounting firms’ growth in their consulting practices threatens audit quality. We conduct an experiment proposed using a registration-based editorial process. We compare a baseline where the auditor does not provide consulting services to conditions where auditors provide consulting to audit clients or where auditors only provide consulting services to nonaudit clients. Our unique design provides evidence on whether providing consulting to nonaudit clients strengthens the salience of a client-cooperative social norm that reduces audit quality. We do not find differences in audit quality by condition in our planned analysis, however we find greater variation in audit quality in the conditions where auditors provide consulting services compared to the baseline. In unplanned analyses, our results suggest providing consulting services increases auditor cooperation with managers, increasing audit quality when managers prefer high audit quality and decreasing audit quality when managers prefer low audit quality.

Introduction

We use experimental markets to examine whether the provision of consulting services to a nonaudit client impacts audit quality. Our paper directly addresses concerns raised by members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) that the largest auditing firms’ evolving business model to a heavy emphasis on their consulting practice threatens audit quality (Harris [2015], Doty [2015]). Over the past ten years, the largest firms have built nonaudit service practices that generate 41% of U.S. Big 4 total revenue. 1 These services now exceed the 34% of revenues generated by the audit practice. With nonaudit service revenue growing at a 10% rate, and assurance revenue at a smaller 4% rate, the gap will continue to grow (Harris [2014]). We examine the impact of a client-cooperative social norm arising from the consulting practice on audit quality. In 2002, legislators created rules restricting the types of nonaudit services that can be performed for audit clients to address the perception that these services negatively impact audit quality (Sarbanes-Oxley [2002] (SOX)). 2 This constraint requires the Big 4 to shift consulting growth to nonaudit clients. As such, the recent nonaudit service growth does not threaten auditor independence. Nevertheless, regulators have raised new concerns around the changing culture within large accounting firms (Harris [2014]). In support of these concerns, analytical models of endogenous social norms suggest organization boundaries matter in preserving high professional norms (Fischer & Huddart [2008]). As accounting firms have become diversified, complex organizations focused on goals of commercial growth and success, the norms of accounting professionalism can come in conflict with the consultants’ commercial norms. We test whether the provision of consulting services impacts audit quality by strengthening the salience of client-cooperative social norms. Consulting services rely on providers to reciprocate a client’s hiring decision by cooperating with management. This strategy leads to repeat hiring that maximizes the consultant’s profit. In contrast, an auditor, who is hired by a client, serves both the client management and the investing public. At times, auditors must set aside manager preferences for those of investors. We explore whether a cooperative social norm from a consulting task influences subsequent auditor decisions to cooperate with management’s reporting preferences.