In this study, we examine auditors’ response to the perceived control risk. Auditors could respond to the increased audit risk in two ways. First, when auditor business risk is perceived to be high, auditors might attempt to reduce detection risk by i ...
In this study, we examine auditors’ response to the perceived control risk. Auditors could respond to the increased audit risk in two ways. First, when auditor business risk is perceived to be high, auditors might attempt to reduce detection risk by increasing substantive testing to maintain overall audit risk at an acceptable level. This suggests that perceived higher auditor business risk will create significant additional work for auditors(i.e.,higher audit effort from additional testing and making changes in the audit program). Second, although increased audit effort can reduce auditor business risk, audit effort alone is unlikely to eliminate the increased auditor business risk. Alternatively, it may not be cost efficient to increase audit effort above a certain level. This suggests that there remains “residual” risk associated with auditor business risk after increasing the audit effort to a certain level. One way for the auditor to recover the cost arising from the residual risk could be charging a risk premium in the form of higher fees per unit of audit service. However, little evidence is currently available on the auditors’ response to the increased auditor business risk.
Total audit fees can be viewed as the product of the total audit hours and the fee per audit hour. The number of total audit hours and the fee per audit hour, respectively, will reflect the increased audit effort and the higher risk premium, both of which will lead to the increased total audit fees.
Under the Act on External Audit of Stock Companies, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) performs regulatory reviews on the financial statements included in the annual reports of public companies. If the FSS finds material misstatements in the financial statements, it evaluates the nature and the quantitative materiality of the misstatements. Depending on the severity of the violation, an appropriate sanction against the company will be imposed. Therefore, receiving a sanction from the FSS regulatory reviews constitutes strong objective evidence that the client’s financial statements contain material misstatements and errors. Material misstatements and errors relate to higher audit risk for auditors. Using the sanctions from the FSS regulatory reviews during the period of 2003-2011 as a proxy of auditor business risk, we examine auditors’ reponses to the perceived auditor business risk. We expect that both the quantity of audit hours and the unit audit price increase in auditor business risk.
Consistent with our prediction, we find that the audit hours for the sanctioned clients in the post-sanction period are significantly higher than those for either the non-sanctioned clients or the pre-sanction period for the sanctioned clients. Importantly, we also find that the fee per hour of the sanctioned clients in the post-sanction period is significantly higher than that of either the non-sanctioned clients or the pre-sanction period of the sanctioned clients. This finding provides evidence that auditors respond to the increased auditor business risk by increasing audit effort and also charging an additional risk premium. Our finding is generally robust to several additional tests, including a score-matched analysis, subsample analyses by partitioning sanctions into subcategories based on the severity of the violation.
Our study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, our study contributes to the research on auditor response to perceived business risk by providing evidence that auditors not only increase audit effort but also increase risk premium when faced with increased auditor business risk. Thus, our work complements previous studies that examine the relationship between the audit risk and the auditor’s behavior. Broadly, our paper suggests that auditor business risk is a significant factor that auditors consider in planning audit effort and setting a risk premium. Second, our finding also provides evidence that regulatory reviews and sanctions matter in that they alter auditors’ behavior.