Abstract
According to the International Standards on Auditing, audit fees are the amount that
remunerates the financial auditor’s activity, the certification of financial statements. The
Profession Code states that these fees should be calculated in an objective way and the auditor’s
independence shouldn’t be influenced by them. This study aims to identify the determinants of
the audit fees, by testing the existence of a circular causality in the connection between audit
fees and the financial performance of a NYSE-quoted company. The analysis is based on a
sample of the first 100 companies (NYSE quoted) of the Top 500 Fortune, except for the
companies in the investment funds and insurances field. In the study there were tested and
validated the following working hypothesis: “the level of the audit fees is mainly influenced by
the company’s capacity to continue its activity”, “the prestige of the audited company
contributes to the decrease of the audit fees” and “the reduced fees level, paid by the customer
audited by one of the Big4 companies in this exercise, contributes to the future prestige
increase”. For data analysis there were used linear regression analysis (simple and multiple)
and the variance analysis (ANOVA). Research results indicate the existence of a circular
causality, bidirectional, on the level of the relationship between audit fees and financial
performance. For data processing, in the study there were used statistical software SPSS 19.0
and AMOS 16.0.