The Study Of The Effect Of Professional Skepticism On Audit Quality

Professional skepticism is not only an essential attribute of auditorsengaged in professional auditing, but also an influential factor in the auditquality. On January1,2007, the new general auditing standards in Chinaintroduced the concept of "professional skepticism", together with variousguidelines that highlighted "professional skepticism" as of great importance.The CSRC statistics in2010showed that a lack of professional skepticism isprobably responsible for audit failures. Recently, with the frequent occurrenceof audit failures, risk of litigation against accounting firms and CPAs continueto amass. In order to ensure the quality of audit, the requirement for auditorsto maintain an appropriately skeptical mindset has come to the fore. Asproviding an academic guideline, researches on audit skepticism conducetowards audit practitioners’ grasping the professional attitude and skill.However, existing resources of literature on professional audit skepticism inour country are relatively scarce. Thereby, the study of auditing professionalskepticism suggests theoretical and practical significance.The main objective of this research is to explore the relationship betweenprofessional skepticism and audit quality. This paper is composed of fivemain sections. The first section will define the essence and connotations of“professional audit skepticism” by extensively investigating the presentliterature. Then the second section will analyze results of previous studies andsummarize the characteristic factors of professional skepticism and theevaluation index of audit quality. Next, by introducing an intermediatevariable–“professional skepticism level”, the third section will construct arelationship model between the characteristic factors of professionalskepticism and the audit quality to propose a set of quantitative hypotheses.The fourth section follows to present and examine the sample data, which wasobtained from a questionnaire survey and processed via the SPSS19.0 statistical software package. Last but not least, the fifth section will applystatistical interpretation of regression outputs to verify the empiricalhypotheses, and draw main conclusions as follows: interpersonal trust,questioning spirit, audit knowledge, epoche judgment, and ethical reasoninghave marked linear correlations with the level of professional skepticism, andhence constitute key factors in determining the level of auditor professionalskepticism; the improvement of the level of professional skepticism helps toimprove audit quality; education level of auditors, audit-related workexperience, and firm size have different effects on audit quality. Finally,based on the research results, this paper will formulate several proposals toimprove the level of professional audit skepticism and ensure the quality ofauditing, and envisage promising directions for future research.