Research On The Relationship Between Voluntary Accounting Policy Change,Audit Cost And Audit Opinion

Accounting standards for enterprises stipulate that accounting policies should be consistent and comparable and should not be changed at will.However,in order to ensure the reliability and relevance of accounting information,the standards also allow enterprises to make adaptive or strategic adjustments to accounting policies according to the change of external environment and their own business objectives.However,in reality,some enterprises make use of accounting policy change to achieve some special purposes,such as huge amount of write-off,policy inducement,income smoothing and so on,which have malicious earnings management nature of accounting policy change behavior.In recent years,with the revision of the Ministry of Finance and the new promulgation of a number of accounting standards,domestic listed companies have issued changes in accounting policies.There are frequent cases of false accounting information,so the voluntary change of accounting policy is regarded as the manipulation of profits by enterprises.In 2017,the China Institute of Certified Public Accountants suggested that significant changes in accounting policies might result in inflated revenue,underestimation of costs,overvaluation of assets,and high audit risks.In addition,the change of accounting policy has strong professionalism and concealment,which increases the difficulty of CPA audit,affects its assessment of whether there is fraud or material misstatement risk in financial statements,and designs the audit procedure.And then affect its audit opinion type and audit fees judgment.However,through combing the literature,the domestic and foreign research in this field lags behind the actual development.Based on this,this paper empirically studies the relationship between voluntary accounting policy changes and audit fees and audit opinions,taking listed companies that have voluntary accounting policy changes in the A-share market during 2011-2016 as a sample,and the relationship between voluntary accounting policy changes and audit fees and audit opinions is empiricallystudied.And according to the nature of the change and property rights of the sample enterprises to carry out classification research.It is found that:(1)the percentage of profit impact of voluntary accounting policy change is positively correlated with non-standard audit opinion,and the higher the percentage of profit effect,the higher the probability of company being issued non-standard audit opinion;(2)there is a significant positive correlation between the percentage of profit impact of voluntary accounting policy change and audit cost,and the profit is significant.The higher the impact percentage,the higher the audit cost;(3)the audit fee is the intermediary variable between the profit impact percentage of voluntary accounting policy change and the non-standard audit opinion,and the higher audit cost will reduce the positive correlation between the two;(4)Accounting firms tend to charge higher audit fees for enterprises that have changed their malicious accounting policies,and the possibility of purchasing audit opinions is more likely;(5)the higher the profit influence percentage of state-owned enterprises' accounting policy is,the higher the audit fee is,and the more likely the audit opinion purchase behavior occurs.Finally,this paper puts forward some suggestions: the regulatory department should speed up the construction of laws and regulations and strengthen the supervision;the CPA should pay attention to the voluntary accounting policy change behavior of enterprises,maintain professional ethics,improve the level of skills,and prevent audit risks;Enterprises should strengthen internal control to improve the quality of accounting information disclosure.