Research Article
A Study on the Determinants of Consolidated Audit Quality
1 Seoul National University, 2 KPMG Samjong
Published: January 2009 · Vol. 38 No. 6 · pp. 1659-1690
Full Text
Abstract
This paper investigates the determinants of audit quality of consolidated financial statements. Given that International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) will be introduced to Korea starting from year 2011 and IFRS mandate the use of consolidated financial statements, it would be very important to examine the audit quality of the consolidated financial statements. Up to now, there has been no research at all in Korea which investigates this issue because not consolidated but non-consolidated (i.e., individual) financial statements have been used as primary financial statements. The audit quality is a very important issue in Korean situation which tries hard to enhance corporate transparency and, thus, attracts more local and foreign investments into capital market. This study makes two predictions on the determinants of the audit quality of consolidated financial statements. First, in audit work for consolidated financial statements, the parent company’s auditor may be different from subsidiaries’ auditors. In such a case, the auditor of parent company needs to depend on the audits of subsidiary companies performed by another auditors in order to consolidate the financial statements of subsidiaries into those of parent company. In such a case, efficient and effective communications between them could be more difficult. Thus, it might be less expected that information sharing and knowledge spillover occurs during the audit procedures if several different auditors are related to the audit of subsidiary companies. As a results, we expect that the more dependence on other auditors decreases the audit quality of consolidated financial statements.
