The Effect of Merger Patterns on Audit Opinion Types

• Main Authors: Chung-WeiChang, 張中瑋
• Other Authors: Hwa-Wei Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84191260180984470545

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 會計學系 === 102 === Mergers and acquisitions (M＆As) have been an active economic activity since the 1980s. They have played an important role in economic growth and increase market power. Such activities arouse stakeholders’ concerns including the disclosure of financial information and the type of audit report issued by auditors. This paper aims to investigate Taiwan domestic individual firms’ audit reports after their M＆A activities and comparing them with non-participants. We evaluate whether M＆A activities reduce the likelihood of firms receiving auditor unqualified opinions, since business failure and audit failure followed by negative news are likely to attract regulators’ scrutiny and investor class-action lawsuits. Prior studies indicate that legal liability and litigation risk affect auditors’ decisions. Therefore, we predict that, to reduce the risk of litigation, auditors will less likely to issue unqualified opinions after M＆A activities involving their clients. We evaluate this prediction empirically and find that the probability of issuing without unqualified opinion is positively associated with the occurrence of M＆As. Further analysis indicates that this positive relation is also significant for firms with pure vertical merger patterns but negatively associated with firms with pure horizontal merger patterns. Our findings show that M＆A participants are less likely to receive unqualified opinion, indicating that audit risk and litigation risk affect auditor conservatism.