Research On The Disclosure Information Content Of Key Audit Matters Of Listed Companies

In 2015,the international council for auditing and certification standards(IAASB)issued a series of new auditing standards,the most notable of which is the disclosure of Key Audit Matters(KAM)in Audit reports.Under the influence of domestic financial environment and international convergence,the ministry of finance of China approved and issued 12 auditing standards including China certified public accountants auditing standard no.1504--communicating key audit matters in audit reports(hereinafter referred to as auditing standard no.1504)on December 23,2016.So-called key audit matters is in the process of the certified public accountants from the audit and the audited units selected from the management of communications,that is to say,the key audit matters is on the premise of not affect the audit opinion,certified public accountants and the audited units more important for all items,or for auditors in the audit process is difficult.Therefore,the additional information disclosed by the key audit items will inevitably have a certain impact on the report users,so the degree and quality of the impact depends on the information content disclosed by the key audit items.The original intention of audit report reform is to provide more information to report users,which is conducive to investment decisions.In order to test whether the key audit items provide valuable information,the paper explores the implementation of the key audit items in the audit report reform,and proposes the research question of this paper: whether the disclosure information of the key audit items of listed companies has information content.In view of this,this study information content as the breakthrough point,carefully combed the research results about the key audit matters,according to the theory of asymmetric information,signaling theory,information processing theory,and behavior decision theory based on analysis and put forward the information content of evaluation standards,analyzes the112 A + H share listed companies in 2018 key audit matters disclosed in audit report,and USES the case analysis and comparative analysis of the method of combining with the listed company ZTE the auditing reports issued by EY in 2016-2018,for example,combined with the specific situation of the enterprise,analysis the key audit matters disclosed confidence levels.It is concluded that the expression of key audit matters has basically formed its own mode in each accounting firm,the whole industry has not been standardized and unified,the number of disclosure of key audit matters has gradually increased and tended to be stable,and the contents disclosed have certain industry personality.In 2016 and 2017,ZTE implemented the new audit report standards,which were too simple in determining the causes of key audit matters and the procedures for audit response.They were not organized but had certain relevance.Comparatively speaking,the content of overall information disclosure in 2018 wassignificantly improved,which basically achieved the original intention of audit report reform.Key audit matters as a whole,the listed company information disclosure has certain information content,but there are also some deficiencies,such as there is repeated in the same company different year revealed some matters,expression of disclosure content template,the disclosure of complicated and too specialized,therefore accounting firms should improve the internal management mechanism,strengthen the training of the auditor,the auditor should also be constantly learning,improve the professional judgment ability,at the same time,policy makers and regulators should also strengthen supervision,perfecting various reform measures,and increase investment in the auditing profession.