High-risk Clients?Individual Auditor's Characteristics And Audit Quality

Audit quality has been one of the major problems affecting the development of the Certified Public Accountant Industry in China.In order to improve the quality of audit,the Chinese Institute of Certified Public Accountants initiated the interview mechanism of audit firms and revised "the Inspection system of audit firms' audit quality" in 2011.However,the Inspection report of audit firms' audit quality shows:the number of certified public accountants who disciplined was up to 920 people in2013-2016,of whom 14 from the Securities Certified Public Accountants,and the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission totally issued 18 administrative penalty announcements to the audit firms and Certified Public Accountants in 2013-2016,All of this shows that the quality of the Certified Public Accountants' audit is still not high in China.In addition,Audit quality is also the eternal research subject in academia,De Angelo(1981)defines audit quality as "joint probability of auditor finding and reporting corporate misstatement and omission",and considers that audit quality depends on auditor's professional competence and independence.So based on the definition of audit quality(De Angelo,1981),the research direction of audit quality's theory and practice turns to auditor's individual level,and began to probe into the influence of the auditor's personal characteristic and behavior on the audit quality.This paper will study the relationship between individual auditor's characteristics and the audit quality under different audit risk levels and study the current situation of the auditor's configuration based on the level of customer audit risk from the auditor's personal level and audit firm's level.This paper is based on the data of Shanghai A-share listed company in2009-2016.Select audit opinion to measure audit quality,collect and calculate the individual auditor's characteristics(audit experience?industry specialization and the client importance)by hand,At the same time,referring to the relevant literature and the audit risk notification bulletin,and defining the listed companies with significant performance fluctuation as high-risk customers,Then the empirical analysis method is used to study the influence of individual auditor's characteristics?the interaction item of the individual auditor's characteristics and the customer audit risk on the audit quality,also study the staffing of the audit firm.Considering that the direction of performance fluctuation is different,the types of risk reflected may differ,so it makes a further analysis about the above research by distinguishing between positive performance fluctuation and negative performance fluctuation.The results show that the ability of the individual auditor does not improve the likelihood of issuing severe audit opinions to high-risk clients,the auditor's risk aversion plays a role;The level of client importance of the individual auditor enhances the likelihood of issuing a stern audit opinion on high-risk clients,especially for the existence of negative to majorperformance fluctuations of high-risk customers;The audit firm has not configured more experienced individual auditors for high-risk clients,and verified the auditor risk avoidance hypothesis.In view of this,the study found that the auditor's personal risk aversion plays a major role in problems of individual auditor's characteristics to audit quality and the staffing of audit firms,and the potential risk of clients is an important microcosmic factor to restrain the customer's importance to auditor's independence.This paper starts from the auditor's personal level,comprehensively studies the relationship between the individual auditor's characteristics and audit quality,and clarifies the microcosmic factors that affect the relationship between the individual auditor's characteristics and audit quality.Based on the view of audit firms,this paper investigates the present situation of the auditor's configuration based on the level of customer audit risk.In addition,the paper also gives a detailed definition of high-risk clients according to the fluctuation of performance.