IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijaape/v9y2013i2p153-183.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political connections, fees paid to auditors and auditor independence in Malaysia: evidence from going concern audit opinions

Author

Listed:
  • Effiezal Aswadi Abdul Wahab
  • Mazlina Mat Zain
  • Rashidah Abdul Rahman

Abstract

This study examines whether auditor independence will be affected by the magnitude of audit and non-audit services fees provided to audit clients and political connections. We predict that auditor independence will be undermined when audit firms provide non-audit services to the audit clients as the provision of the non-audit services to audit clients increases the economic bond between the audit firm and the client. Furthermore, given the unique institutional background in Malaysia, we also test the relationship between auditor independence and political connections. We use the propensity to issue a going concern opinion as a proxy for auditor independence while political connections are represented by two measures namely the proportion of Bumiputras directors on the board and politically connected firms. Contrary to our prediction, we do not observe any association between the propensity to issue going concern opinions and non-audit fees, total fees and the ratio of non-audit fees to total fees. Interestingly, we find evidence to suggest that audit firms are less likely to issue going concern opinions when audit clients have more Bumiputras directors sitting on board. This result is view to be important as it suggests that political connections could undermine auditor independence in fact and appearance.

Suggested Citation

  • Effiezal Aswadi Abdul Wahab & Mazlina Mat Zain & Rashidah Abdul Rahman, 2013. "Political connections, fees paid to auditors and auditor independence in Malaysia: evidence from going concern audit opinions," International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 9(2), pages 153-183.
  • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijaape:v:9:y:2013:i:2:p:153-183
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=54331
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Abdul Wahab, Effiezal Aswadi & Gist, Willie E. & Nik Abdul Majid, Wan Zurina, 2014. "Characteristics of non-audit services and financial restatements in Malaysia," Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(3), pages 225-247.
    2. Reshma Kumari Tiwari & Jasojit Debnath, 2021. "Joint Provision of Non-audit Services to Audit Clients: Empirical Evidences from India," Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers, , vol. 46(3), pages 153-165, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijaape:v:9:y:2013:i:2:p:153-183. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=41 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.