1. Introduction
External audits are required to express an independent opinion on the financial statements of companies and to
monitor managers’ behavior. One of the major management responsibilities is to find external auditor with good
reputation to reduce agency cost. Audit report adds value to the financial statements and may reduce cost of
capital through the independent verification it provides (Johnstone et al., 2001). However, corporate collapses
associated with accounting scandals in the early 21st Century cast doubt over the independence of auditors and
the overall value of auditing (Beattie et al., 1999). That is, if the auditor is not seen to act independently of
management, then the audit loses its main role to all parties.
Recently, non-audit services (NAS) which is defined as any services other than audit provided by auditors to an
audit customer, have the potential to impair independency of auditors (Ye et al., 2011). Regulators fear that
relatively high levels of fees for NAS have the potential to reduce independency of auditors by increasing the
economic promise between them and managements (Quick et al., 2013). In this manner, Beattie et al. (1999)
pointed out that how an auditor with a legal responsibility to shareholder can handle commercial relation with
the management of company and remain independence. Most of previous researches of NAS and its relation with
agency costs have been conducted in US, UK and Australia. However, this relationship might be different for
Jordanian companies compared with others, due to the fact that most of publically held companies in Jordan are
family business which may affect the agency cost.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 defines the problem of the study. Section 3 identifies the
objective of the study. Section 4 reviews previous studies and develops the theoretical framework of the study
and. Section 5 describes the research methodology used in the study. Section 6 presents the results of the study.
Section 7 concludes and recommends future studies.