Study On The Influence Of Exchange Annual Report Inquiry Letter On Audit Opinion

The inquiry letter of annual report is a kind of inquiry letter sent by the exchange to the listed company for the decision-making information of investors in the annual report after the listed company discloses the annual report.The annual report inquiry focuses on the authenticity of financial reporting data,industry and corporate strategy,corporate governance,as well as corporate issues and potential risks.Upon receipt of the inquiry letter of the annual report,the listed company shall,as required,make explanations,supplementary explanations or corrections to the problems listed in the letter,and make timely replies.Exchanges are responsible for front-line supervision of information disclosure quality control of listed companies.The inquiry letter of annual report is a supervision method for information disclosure quality of listed companies.Will it affect the audit quality of annual reports of listed companies?This paper selects audit opinions as an alternative measure of audit quality,and examines whether the annual report inquiry letter will have an impact on the annual report audit opinions.Meanwhile,it further analyzes whether the influence degree of the annual report inquiry letter on the audit opinions will be different due to the different nature of the enterprises receiving the letters.In this paper,probit regression model was used to carry out empirical analysis on enterprises that received the inquiry letters of the annual reports of shenzhen stock exchange and Shanghai stock exchange from 2015 to 2017 as samples.The empirical study shows that there is a significant negative correlation between whether the listed company receives the inquiry letter of the annual report and The Times of receiving the letter and the audit opinion of the current period,and the influence is not affected by the intervention of the nature of the enterprise.That is,compared with the enterprises that did not receive the annual report inquiry letter,the enterprises that received the annual report inquiry letter were more likely to be issued with non-standard audit opinions that year.In addition,there is no significant difference between the impact of the inquiry letter of the annual report on the audit opinion in state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises.Based on the results of empirical analysis,this paper believes that the annual report inquiry can improve the audit quality of the annual report by increasing the audit risk faced by the auditor,prompting the auditor to maintain their independence in the audit,improve the practice of prudence,and objectively issue audit opinions.But to continue to play a role,the exchange still needs to strengthen the review of the annual report of listed companies,timely and targeted letter,and strictly deal with companies that fail to reply to the letter of inquiry on time,so as to improve the binding force and deterrent force of the letter of inquiry of the annual report.