Audit Fees Empirical Study

Audit market has become increasingly prominent in economic development. Besides, it expands the influences to capital market. Audit market contains many complicated interfering factors, one important factor is the audit fees that certified public accountants charge when they work. Audit fees will affect the quality of audit. If accounting firms charge excessively low audit fees, they have no choice but to reduce audit working proceduce, cut down audit working time to reduce the cost of audit service. Accordingly, the quality of audit reduces. Audit fees not only relate to the quality of audit but also the independence when certified public accountant profess. Whether audit fees have effect to the basic principles of professionalism especially the independent character of audit, the charges level that the CPA charge and their corresponging service play a key role. If each accounting firm aims at soliciting customers and expanding business by low price, the confidence level of audit report will drop. Studying audit fees is significant. We can become familiar with audit industy and audit market. Meanwhile, regulators can know well with the competetion of audit market and illegal activities. So as to supervise effectively to avoid soliciting customers and competing at low price. Go further, they can draw up reasonable, scientific fee scale to promote our audit industry's development and create good image of CPA.This article begins with document survey, looks back the research achievement at home or abroad, kowns the status quo of audit fees and consults existing research methods. By researching the status quo of our audit market, problems such as no unified audit fees standard in audit market, lack effective discovery mechanism, malignantly low price competition between firms are revealed. Reasons are listed from three aspects, one is that audit market lacks spontaneity demand. Another is the low risk of action at law, the last is that audit fees do not disclose sufficiently and lacks transparency. After mastering the background of audit fees, this paper analyses a few influence factors to audit fees such as the scale, complexity, governance structure and audit risk and the areas of the audit customers and the scale of accounting firms. Then put forward corresponding hypothesis. This article chooses data that comes from Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets in 2009 as proofs. Most data is adopted from RESSET financial research database and CSMAR database. Sorted data is analysed by spss17.0 from descriptive statistic and multiple linear regression. According to authentic proof, identify problems then put forward corresponding policy and advice.The conclusion of this paper is as follows, the scale of total assets, the inventory for total assets ratio, floating assets for total assets ratio, the assets-liabilities ratio, state-owned shares ratio, accounting firms whether for the first 14 big institutes, the consumption level of the locate of listed corporation, all the variables above have significant correlation with audit fees at the level of 1%. Current ratio, listed corporations being "ST" or not have significant correlation with audit fees at the level of 5%. Roe of guaranteed qualifications has significant correlation at the level of 10% with audit fees. The account receivable for the total assets ratio, roe for guaranteed allotment, the auditor's opinion type and outstanding shares ratio have no significant correlation with audit fees. While the scale of total assets, floating assets for the total assets ratio, the assets-liabilities ratio, accounting firms whether for the first 14 big institute, the consumption level of the locate of listed corporations, listed corporations being "ST" or not have significantly positive correlation with audit fees. The inventory for the total assets ratio, state-owned shares ratio, and roe of guaranteed qualification have significantly negative correlation with audit fees.