The Impact Of Sharing Auditors With Suppliers Or Customers On Enterprise Supply Chain Competitiveness

Since 2016,the competitive advantage of the supply chain(supply chain competitiveness)has been valued by many parties.The decline of enterprises that voluntarily disclose suppliers and customers by as much as 40% reflects the important position of supply chain competitiveness.In recent years,under the impact of the COVID-19,enterprises have reached the point of life and death due to demand reduction,high costs and other factors.Supply chain competitiveness has become a necessary condition for enterprise competitive development.The Vice President of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation also talked about the serious impact of the COVID-19 on enterprises and supply chains in "Enhancing the New Competitive Advantage of China’s Global Supply Chain",and emphasized the importance and necessity of improving the competitiveness of supply chains.At the same time,the Party Central Committee also attaches great importance to the development of the supply chain.It has mentioned the supply chain many times in the six major powers proposed in the report of the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China and pointed out that the supply chain should be lean managed to ensure the safety and stability of the supply chain.Therefore,how to optimize supply chain management and improve supply chain competitiveness is particularly important in today’s situation.As an emerging research topic in the field of audit in recent years,shared auditors have gradually penetrated into the relevant links in the supply chain.Relevant studies have proved that they may affect the inventory management,supply chain relationship specific investment,sales management efficiency,etc.of enterprises.However,although these studies are aimed at improving the competitiveness of the supply chain,they focus on a specific link in the supply chain.As an external medium,whether it will become one of the ways to improve the overall supply chain competitiveness of enterprises remains to be studied.Therefore,this paper studies whether shared auditors will affect supply chain competitiveness.Based on the data of China’s A-share listed enterprises from 2014 to2020,this paper explores the impact of shared auditors on supply chain competitiveness in combination with knowledge spillover theory,information asymmetry theory,stakeholder theory and information decision theory,and then conducts empirical tests,hoping to prove that shared auditors can significantly reduce the dependence of enterprises on suppliers and customers,thus improving the competitiveness of the supply chain,Dependency is a measure of supply chain competitiveness.The empirical results show that:(1)The sharing of auditors between enterprises and suppliers or customers will reduce the dependence of enterprises on suppliers and customers,thus improving the competitiveness of the supply chain.(2)The industry expertise of auditors has a positive regulatory effect on sharing auditors to reduce the dependence of suppliers and customers and improve the competitiveness of the supply chain.In further analysis,it is found that shared auditors exists in state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises,but the sharing effect is stronger in non-state-owned enterprises.The moderating effect of audit industry expertise is not significant in state-owned enterprises,but significant in non-state-owned enterprises.It is preliminarily speculated that the average level of industry expertise of accounting firms hired by state-owned enterprises is higher,weakening the moderating effect.The main contributions of this study are as follows: Firstly,the research on the combination of shared auditors and supply chain competitiveness innovation enriches the theoretical research of shared auditors,and puts forward new thinking for the methods of improving supply chain competitiveness.Secondly,the research on audit and supply chain competitiveness has been further extended on the basis of the past,from a certain link and a certain index that affect competitiveness directly to competitiveness itself.Thirdly,taking the audit industry expertise as the adjusting variable,the influence of auditor’s personal characteristics on the sharing effect is considered.The research is conducive to the selection and decision-making of auditors by supply chain related enterprises,and is conducive to improving the competitiveness of the supply chain.