Unofficial Auditor Team And Audit Quality

Improving audit quality is one of the important ways for audit firms to become bigger and stronger.How to effectively improve the audit quality of audit firms has always been the focus of widespread attention in academia,the public and regulatory authorities.In recent years,scholars have conducted a lot of theoretical analysis and empirical tests on the factors that affect audit quality,and have achieved fruitful research results.Through literature review,it can be found that most of these literature studies examine the demand and supply factors that affect audit quality from the level of audit firms and auditors,but they pay little attention to unofficial auditor teams between these two levels,ignoring the impact of auditors interaction within the unofficial team on audit quality.In a rapidly changing business environment,the interaction of auditors within the unofficial team has increasingly highlighted the audit process and audit quality.Therefore,a deep understanding of the role played by the unofficial auditor team in the audit process has important theoretical and practical significance for promoting the improvement of audit quality.This paper defines a unofficial auditor team as a collection of auditors in the same firm that have direct or indirect associations by cooperating with each other.The first question that this paper focuses on is,how does the size of the unofficial auditor team affect audit quality?In the unofficial auditor team,the performance of individual auditors is also a concern of this paper.The direct or indirect connections between the individual auditors constitute the social network of the auditor team,and auditors in different network positions have different performance due to their different ability to obtain network capital.In social network theory,network centrality is usually used to describe an individual's network location,so how does the auditor team social network centrality affect its audit quality?Based on this,on the basis of the existing research results,this paper uses a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical testing to analyze the relationship between the team size,auditor team social network centrality and audit quality from the perspective of the unofficial auditor team,and further investigates the impact of the size of the audit firm and the presence of leaders in the team on the relationship between the two.This paper mainly attempts to explore the following three issues:First,whether the size of the unofficial team formed by auditors due to their professional experience will have an impact on audit quality.Second,for individual auditors within the auditor team,whether the centrality of the team social network will affect the individuals' audit quality.Third,the size of the audit firm,that is,the domestic “Top Ten” and non-“Top Ten”,and the presence or absence of the leader of the auditor team,how it affects the relationship between the size of the auditor team,the auditor team social network centrality,and audit quality.The paper found that the auditor team size is negatively correlated with audit quality,and the auditor team social network centrality is positively correlated with audit quality.Further research also found that the relationship between the auditor team size and the auditor team social network centrality and audit quality is only established in the non-“Top Ten”client group;in a team with leaders,as the number of team member increases,their behavior is more radical,and the impact of auditor team social network centrality on audit quality is mainly reflected in the suppression of customers' positive earnings management behaviors;in a team without leaders,as the number of team member increases,its behavior becomes more conservative,the performance is that customers have more negative earnings management behaviors,and the impact of auditor team social network centrality on audit quality is mainly manifested in the suppression of customer ' s negative earnings management behaviors.The full paper consists of 6 chapters,of which Chapter 1 is the introduction.This part briefly introduced the research background,significance,purpose,content,methods,framework and research innovation of this paper;Chapter 2 is the literature review,this part combined the theme of this paper in recent years,the domestic and foreign relevant literature on audit quality influence factors,the impact of team characteristics on organizational performance,and the impact of network location on performance have been sorted out and summarized;Chapter 3 defined relevant concepts and theoretical basis.First of all,the concepts of unofficial auditor team and audit quality were defined.Secondly,the related theoretical foundations such as similar attraction theory,social identity theory,and social network theory were briefly introduced.Chapter 4 is research hypothesis and research design.This part built the theoretical analysis framework of this paper on the basis of existing literature and related theories,put forward reasonable research hypotheses based on theoretical analysis,and conducted corresponding research based on the research hypotheses design.Chapter 5 is empirical testing and analysis.First,this part used the constructed multiple linear regression model to conduct empirical tests on issues such as the size of the unofficial auditor team and whether the auditor team network centrality has a significant impact on audit quality.The empirical test results were basically analyzed;secondly,they were group regressed according to the size of the audit firm and whether there are leaders in the auditor team,and the results were explained;finally,by replacing the proxy variables of audit quality and using the propensity score matching,the robustness test was conducted.Chapter 6 is the research conclusion.This part summarized the results of empirical testing and analysis.