独立审计职业声誉损害与市场反应——中天勤事件的进一步研究

Abstract

独立审计是提高会计信息可信性和缓解委托代理成本的有效机制，其作用的发挥取决于审计质量，而职业声誉是市场衡量审计质量的便捷标准，问题是，注册会计师职业声誉的损害是否会削弱社会公众对审计质量的评价进而影响市场对公司价值的判断，对此，我们并不清楚。本文以银广夏事件作为切入点研究了职业声誉损害的影响，结果发现银广夏造假公开日和中注协宣布将对中天勤进行严肃查处日其审计的其他上市公司异常报酬率显著为负，而且市场的负面反应考虑到了审计意见的类型以及上市公司盈余报告的质量。这说明，由于审计质量的不可观测，当注册会计师的职业声誉受到损害时，社会公众的确会降低对其审计质量的评价，进而影响到市场对其审计的其他上市公司价值的评价。

Independent auditing can be used to improve the credibility of accounting information and to reduce agency costs. The effectiveness of independent auditing depends on the quality of auditing. Reputation of the auditing firm can be used as a proxy for the quality of auditing. In this paper, we ask the question of whether damaged reputation of independent auditors has a negative effect on the credibility of auditing itself and audited financial statements. We use Guangxia scandal as a case to study this potential negative effect. We find significant negative abnormal returns for other firms audited by Zhongtianqing (Guangxia’s auditor) in the event window of the announcement day for Guangxia’s fraud. The results are robust to the inclusion of earnings quality and the types of auditing. The results suggest that the market reacts negatively to damaged reputation of independent auditors.