There are also several disadvantages of these measures. One major limitation is that the absence of a restatement or
AAER cannot be interpreted as high audit quality. This is because low quality audits may prevent egregious failures, which
are captured by restatements and AAERs, but fail to prevent less egregious within-GAAP earnings management. In addition,
material misstatements allowed by low-quality audits may simply go undetected. Another limitation of restatements and
AAERs is that they are relatively rare events, which limits their statistical power and makes them impractical when sample
sizes are relatively small. Lastly, it is important to acknowledge that auditors only provide “reasonable assurance” that
the financials are free of material errors, and even high quality audits may not catch highly elaborate well-concealed fraud.
As a result, it is important to control for the firm's innate risks that are beyond auditor's control.