The Association between Auditor's Client Importance and Key Audit Matters

• Main Authors: YEN, PEI-TING, 嚴沛渟
• Other Authors: HUNG, SHENG-MIN
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/7s7z2e

碩士 === 東吳大學 === 會計學系 === 107 === Accounting Research and Development Foundation issued SAS No. 57 “Financial Statements Audit Report” and SAS No. 58 “Communicating Key Audit Matters in the Independent Auditor’s Report” referred to ISA700 in 2015. The listed companies have implemented this extended audit report in Taiwan since 2016. The implementation of extended audit report, which requires auditors to disclose Key Audit Matters ( KAMs ), not only affects the way of the financial report users to fully comprehend the auditor’s report and key audit matters, which are the essential disclosures of auditor’s judgment, but also affects investors make various decisions. This study uses the listed companies in Taiwan that exclude the financial industry from 2016 to 2017 as a sample to examine the relation between client importance and number of KAMs. Our test is conducted at the audit firm level, lead audit partner level and concurring audit partner level, and focus on whether auditors who fear of losing audits or non-audit contracts reduce the number of KAMs for the company because of the higher client importance. The results of the study indicate that the audit firm and concurring audit partner will reduce the number of KAMs in the current year on account of the increased client importance. However, if we measure client importance based on non-audit fees, the client importance of lead audit partner is significantly negatively correlated with the number of KAMs. In addition, the study selected the samples of each of the Big4 audit firms and the non-Big4 audit firms for empirical analysis in Taiwan. The results indicate that Big4 auditors are more likely to reduce the number of KAMs due to higher client importance.