IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bzn/wpaper/bemps11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Benefits and Costs of Auditor's Assurance: Evidence from the Review of Quarterly Financial Statements

Author

Listed:
  • Jean Bédard

    (Université Laval.)

  • Lucie Courteau

    (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, School of Economics and Management.)

Abstract

Even though there is a worldwide consensus as to the necessity of an audit of annual financial statements for public companies, there is divergence of views as to the review of interim financial statements. While some jurisdictions make it mandatory (e.g., Australia, France, US), others allow the review without requiring it (e.g., Canada, UK). Using a sample of companies listed in Canada, we examine the costs associated with these reviews and the benefits they generate in terms of improvement in the quality of interim financial statements for the years 2004 and 2005. Controlling for the decision to purchase the reviews, we find that audit fees are 18 percent higher for firms with interim reviews and, contrary to many regulators’ assumption, we find no evidence that this cost increase is proportionally higher for smaller firms. Regarding the benefits of interim reviews, we find no significant association between either accruals- or non accruals-based measures of earnings management and the fact that the interim statements are reviewed by the auditor, neither in the interim reports nor in those of the fourth quarter. The results suggest that auditors’ involvement with interim reports may not be as effective as previously thought at controlling the quality of interim financial statements.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean Bédard & Lucie Courteau, 2013. "Benefits and Costs of Auditor's Assurance: Evidence from the Review of Quarterly Financial Statements," BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series BEMPS11, Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen.
    • Handle: RePEc:bzn:wpaper:bemps11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repec.unibz.it/bemps11.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Clarkson, Peter M. & Simunic, Dan A., 1994. "The association between audit quality, retained ownership, and firm-specific risk in U.S. vs. Canadian IPO markets," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1-2), pages 207-228, January.
    2. Chih†Ying Chen & Chan†Jane Lin & Yu†Chen Lin, 2008. "Audit Partner Tenure, Audit Firm Tenure, and Discretionary Accruals: Does Long Auditor Tenure Impair Earnings Quality?," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 25(2), pages 415-445, June.
    3. Simunic, Da, 1980. "The Pricing Of Audit Services - Theory And Evidence," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(1), pages 161-190.
    4. Graham, John R. & Harvey, Campbell R. & Rajgopal, Shiva, 2005. "The economic implications of corporate financial reporting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1-3), pages 3-73, December.
    5. Kerstein, Joseph & Rai, Atul, 2007. "Intra-year shifts in the earnings distribution and their implications for earnings management," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 399-419, December.
    6. Dan S. Dhaliwal & Cristi A. Gleason & Lillian F. Mills, 2004. "Last†Chance Earnings Management: Using the Tax Expense to Meet Analysts' Forecasts," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(2), pages 431-459, June.
    7. Isabelle Huault & V. Perret & S. Charreire-Petit, 2007. "Management," Post-Print halshs-00337676, HAL.
    8. Somnath Das & Pervin K. Shroff & Haiwen Zhang, 2009. "Quarterly Earnings Patterns and Earnings Management," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 26(3), pages 797-831, September.
    9. Ettredge, Mike & Simon, Dan & Smith, David & Stone, Mary, 1994. "Why do companies purchase timely quarterly reviews?," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 131-155, September.
    10. Debra Jeter & Lakshmanan Shivakumar, 1999. "Cross-sectional estimation of abnormal accruals using quarterly and annual data: effectiveness in detecting event-specific earnings management," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(4), pages 299-319.
    11. Francis, Jere R., 2004. "What do we know about audit quality?," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 345-368.
    12. Lawrence D. Brown & Arianna Spina Pinello, 2007. "To What Extent Does the Financial Reporting Process Curb Earnings Surprise Games?," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(5), pages 947-981, December.
    13. Cindy Durtschi & Peter Easton, 2005. "Earnings Management? The Shapes of the Frequency Distributions of Earnings Metrics Are Not Evidence Ipso Facto," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(4), pages 557-592, September.
    14. Dechow, Patricia & Ge, Weili & Schrand, Catherine, 2010. "Understanding earnings quality: A review of the proxies, their determinants and their consequences," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(2-3), pages 344-401, December.
    15. Aloke Ghosh & Steven Lustgarten, 2006. "Pricing of Initial Audit Engagements by Large and Small Audit Firms," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 23(2), pages 333-368, June.
    16. Lei Chen & Elizabeth Carson & Roger Simnett, 2007. "Impact of stakeholder characteristics on voluntary dissemination of interim information and communication of its level of assurance," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 47(4), pages 667-691, December.
    17. Jacob, John & Jorgensen, Bjorn N., 2007. "Earnings management and accounting income aggregation," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2-3), pages 369-390, July.
    18. Jones, Jj, 1991. "Earnings Management During Import Relief Investigations," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(2), pages 193-228.
    19. Kothari, S.P. & Leone, Andrew J. & Wasley, Charles E., 2005. "Performance matched discretionary accrual measures," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 163-197, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dechow, Patricia & Ge, Weili & Schrand, Catherine, 2010. "Understanding earnings quality: A review of the proxies, their determinants and their consequences," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(2-3), pages 344-401, December.
    2. Kajüter, Peter & Klassmann, Florian & Nienhaus, Martin, 2016. "Do Reviews by External Auditors Improve the Information Content of Interim Financial Statements?," The International Journal of Accounting, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 23-50.
    3. DeFond, Mark & Zhang, Jieying, 2014. "A review of archival auditing research," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 275-326.
    4. Fujiyama, Keishi & 藤山, 敬史 & Kagaya, Tetsuyuki & 加賀谷, 哲之 & Suzuki, Tomohiro & 鈴木, 智大 & Takahashi, Yukari, 2014. "Quarterly Earnings Management Around The World: Loss Avoidance Or Earnings Decrease Avoidance?," Hitotsubashi Journal of commerce and management, Hitotsubashi University, vol. 48(1), pages 1-30, October.
    5. Alhababsah, Salem & Alhaj-Ismail, Alaa, 2023. "Does shared tenure between audit committee chair and engagement partner affect audit outcomes? Evidence from the UK," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 55(2).
    6. Habib, Ahsan, 2011. "Audit firm industry specialization and audit outcomes: Insights from academic literature," Research in Accounting Regulation, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 114-129.
    7. James Jianxin Gong & S. Mark Young & Aner Zhou, 2023. "Real earnings management and the strategic release of new products: evidence from the motion picture industry," Review of Accounting Studies, Springer, vol. 28(3), pages 1209-1249, September.
    8. Habib, Ahsan & Hossain, Mahmud, 2008. "Do managers manage earnings to ‘just meet or beat’ analyst forecasts?," Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 79-91.
    9. Dichev, Ilia D. & Graham, John R. & Harvey, Campbell R. & Rajgopal, Shiva, 2013. "Earnings quality: Evidence from the field," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 1-33.
    10. Yusuke Takasu & Makoto Nakano, 2012. "What Do Smoothed Earnings Tell Us about the Future?," The Japanese Accounting Review, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University, vol. 2, pages 1-32, December.
    11. Chen, Changling & Kim, Jeong-Bon & Yao, Li, 2017. "Earnings smoothing: Does it exacerbate or constrain stock price crash risk?," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 36-54.
    12. Frost, Carol Ann & Guragai, Binod & Rapley, Eric T., 2017. "Differences in responses to accounting-based and market-based benchmarks – Evidence from Nasdaq," Advances in accounting, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 46-62.
    13. Casey, Ryan J. & Kaplan, Steven E. & Pinello, Arianna Spina, 2015. "Do auditors constrain benchmark beating behavior to a greater extent in the fourth versus interim quarters?," Advances in accounting, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 1-10.
    14. Fargher, Neil & Wee, Marvin, 2019. "The impact of Ball and Brown (1968) on generations of research," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 55-72.
    15. Yim, Andrew, 2013. "Mixture and Continuous 'Discontinuity' Hypotheses: An Earnings Management Model with Auditor-Required Adjustment," MPRA Paper 44702, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Ball, Fiona & Tyler, Jonathan & Wells, Peter, 2015. "Is audit quality impacted by auditor relationships?," Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 166-181.
    17. Gipper, Brandon & Hail, Luzi & Leuz, Christian, 2017. "On the Economics of Audit Partner Tenure and Rotation: Evidence from PCAOB Data," Research Papers repec:ecl:stabus:3588, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    18. Richard Frankel & Hagit Levy & Ron Shalev, 2017. "Factors Associated with the Year-End Decline in Working Capital," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(2), pages 438-458, February.
    19. Jia, Y., 2008. "Essays on the role of managerial type in financial reporting," Other publications TiSEM ab1af530-b40f-4c86-9edd-b, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    20. Ku He & Xiaofei Pan & Gary Tian, 2017. "Legal Liability, Government Intervention, and Auditor Behavior: Evidence from Structural Reform of Audit Firms in China," European Accounting Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(1), pages 61-95, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Interim Financial Reporting; Auditor Reviews; Regulation; Audit Fees; Unexpected Accruals.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • M41 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Accounting - - - Accounting
    • M49 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Accounting - - - Other

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:bzn:wpaper:bemps11. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: F. Marta L. Di Lascio or Alessandro Fedele (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/feubzit.html .

    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.