What do we know about audit quality?
Summing up, it turns out that we know more about audit quality than we might have
originally suspected:
† Auditing is relative inexpensive, less than 1/10 of one percent of aggregate client sales;
† Outright audit failures with material economic consequences are very infrequent;
† Audit reports are informative, despite the presence of false positive and negatives;
† Audit quality is positively associated with earnings quality;
† Audit quality is affected by legal regimes and the incentives they create;
† There is evidence of differential audit quality by Big 4 firms and industry experts, and
differential audit quality across individual offices of Big 4 firms and across different
legal regimes;
† Academic research has had little impact on regulations and policy-making in the US,
although it may have had more influence in other countries such as the United
Kingdom